I finished reading Cory Doctorow's Little Brother the other night (much more on that next month) and was stopped in my tracks by a reference to urban planner and author, Jane Jacobs. I bought her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities earlier this year but haven't had a chance to read it yet. In Little Brother the main character, Marcus, thinks of Jacobs when he arrives at the San Francisco Civic Center, a dead area that he feels diminishes the city. Here's a bit from an interview with Jacobs in 2001 at Reason Magazine:

Reason: What should a city be like?

Jane Jacobs: It should be like itself. Every city has differences, from its history, from its site, and so on. These are important. One of the most dismal things is when you go to a city and it's like 12 others you've seen. That's not interesting, and it's not really truthful.

The Jacobs reference stopped me because I had just followed a link from Ed to a post on St Louis, a city that has been on a serious downhill slide for some time now. We drove through it (on the freeway of course) last fall and were shocked by how awful it looked - all of it. Broken windows, abandoned neighborhoods, trashed out cars on blocks. It was like a post-riot picture except there was no riot. Very unsettling.

From "The Slow Death of a City Block":

The consequences are far-reaching and many-layered. This is no longer a walkable neighborhood, not in the sense of being able to meet basic necessities without a car; even if the surviving houses were occupied, the retail stores which once served the street (a corner store at each end of the block, with more around the corner) are long gone. This is no longer a self-sufficient neighborhood; tax base vanishes along wih population. This is no longer a community; there are no social networks in place, no neighbors at all. This is no longer a place; there is no definition of space, no boundaries, no sense of enclosure, no meetings between public and private, no interweaving of many functions, no commerce; there is only scattered, leftover objects.

This whole site is amazing - it salutes "historic architecture of St. Louis, Missouri -- mourning the losses, celebrating the survivors". I'm an avid reader of BLDG Blog (and looking forward to the book) but I'd really like to see sites like this one for major urban areas across the country. It's an excellent resource for studying social history and a way to reconsider what has been done wrong as we rethink the future of our cities.

And we are rethinking, as this article on the suburbs explains. It's hard to live an hour away from where you work anymore - or a similar distance from where you go to school or your kids have their dance classes, etc. I grew up in the suburbs and the only place close enough to walk or bike was school. Everything else was miles away which was what everyone seemed to want but I think the bubble has burst on that idea. It doesn't mean you can't live "out in the country" (people have always lived out in the country) but the daily commute is history. Forty years ago no one was thinking, and now, in the 21st century we have a lot of work to do.

I blame the engineers who promised us flying cars. If we had those babies, none of the rest of this would matter.

[Post pic of St Louis]