Christina Stone
905207892
Homework 3
Generating Urban Diversity: Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs argues four main factors in generating urban diversity and growth. Her main
concern is always the mixture of anything and everything. Everything in the city has to be used for more
than one thing, for a city to truly be diverse all of the components that compile the city have to be
diverse in themselves and useful for more than one objective.
The first and most important element in generating urban diversity within a city is that the
district and as many individual parts of it as possible should serve more than one function and
preferably more than two. All of the elements of the city should attract people during all times of the
day. The city must be able to support an influx of different people throughout the day who are traveling
for different purposes but who can use many of the same common buildings. This argument makes
perfect sense to me. I find this to be the most basic and crucial aspect of generating diversity in a city. A
city is made up of essentially three different groups of people: the workers, the residents, and the
visitors. A city has to be able to meet all of these peoples’ needs because without even one subgroup of
these people there wouldn’t be enough revenue coming into the enterprises of a city to sustain them.
These people all need to be able to access points across the city without having to go around
large parts of the city to get there. All of these people are in the city for different reasons and appearing
at different times but all using the same streets. “The street is the river of life of the city, the place
where we come together, the pathway to the center.”[Whyte] William Whyte will argue that the street
is almost the heartbeat of a city, it keeps the city pumping and moving and allows everyone in and out.
It only makes sense to make more veins across the city to allow people to pump through more
efficiently. To be able to support diversity across a large city with so many people it’s important to have
short blocks and many side streets. Side streets and cut-throughs generate pools of people where more
businesses can pop up and become successful off of the main way. Large cities require small side streets
of else all of the traffic is pushed into a few streets that run the distance of the city. It’s impractical to
have to walk all the way down and across and up a block to get only across the way from where you
started. Small blocks allows for more convenient commerce and distribution, it allows for more people
from across the city to mingle and encourages business across cities because of the easy access. Her
argument for small blocks is important because it allows for so much more mixing of the people and
businesses across the city, I think that alone acts as a catalyst for diversity.
