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#8: Places vs. Designs — In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs studied the best loved neighborhoods of cities like New York, Boston and Toronto and documented the positive characteristics they shared in common. Things like human-scaled streets and sidewalks, mixed-use blocks with coffee shops active in the morning and bars and restaurants lively at night. 

I first read this book over 20 years ago, and it changed the way I see public spaces, and offered real world examples of places that work. “Placemaking” in the sense used by urban planners, has since adopted much of her thinking. It has also been applied to the design of artificial locations such as retail, dining and entertainment (RDE) leisure destinations.

In 1961, when this book was written, Jacobs’ work flew in the face of prevailing trends in urban design, from Ebenezer Howard’s aging “Garden City” vision to other utopian design approaches lauded in the writings of Lewis Mumford. She was a vocal critic of New York’s Robert Moses. William H. Whyte further defined successful cities in his book, The Secret Life of Small Urban Spaces, which led to NYC’s Project For Public Spaces developing 11 Principles for Placemaking. Number 2 on that list is, “Places, Not Designs.”

Sometimes I feel like architects (and their clients) fall in love with a design, even if it may not make for a good place for humans to live, work and spend time together. Howard’s Garden City illustrations influenced things like EPCOT, the “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.” The original plan for over 20,000 people actively living there was scrapped following Walt’s death in 1966. 

Frank Lloyd Wright designed homes, hotels and office spaces, but also envisioned the Mile-High Illinois, an unbuild skyscraper that would have been twice as tall as the Burj Khalifa. Perhaps it’s not too late for the grandiose plans for NEOM’s The Line in Saudi Arabia — a “city” contained within a single,100-mile long mirrored glass skyscraper — to be reconsidered for its merit as a place for people to live, rather than a concept that looks cool in an architectural rendering.

— Ryan Miziker