The Four Essential Ingredients for Urban Diversity (According to Jane Jacobs)

SNAPSHOT: Author, activist, and untrained urbanist Jane Jacobs took the planning world by storm in 1961 when she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Comparing biological diversity to urban diversity, Jacobs had an intuitive understanding of what made the ecology of a neighborhood thrive and what created dead space. Below are the four essential components of urban diversity.

Four Ingredients of Thriving and Diverse Districts

Jacobs championed for diversity of purpose and use, economic classes, and cultures.

One. Mixed Primary Uses

“The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must ensure that presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.”

Primary uses are the reasons that people go to a district, like a thriving entertainment hub. Secondary diversity accounts for all of the enterprises that move into an area to support the primary uses, like restaurants and coffee shops. The secret to a successful mix of uses is keeping the streets busy at all times of day with all kinds of people. In order to achieve this, an area needs to draw 9–5 office workers, daytime shoppers, students, restaurant patrons, and residents.

A single-use business district without secondary diversity is doomed, since the area will be deserted after 5pm. After the district becomes vacant, businesses move away to be nearer to clients and draw more desirable talent. However, a business district that is also host to residential units, restaurants, shops, and theaters can expect to thrive and evolve.

Two. Short Blocks

“Most blocks must be short, that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.”

Short blocks ensure that pedestrians aren’t limited to an isolated route. Allowing frequent opportunities to turn the corner and explore a new path can enrich the social life of a district and help businesses in all locations flourish. This gives the independent grocer or new bookstore a fighting chance of attracting customers, strengthening the economy overall.

Three. Aging Buildings

“The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.”

Buildings must be mixed in age and condition so that people of all socio-economic backgrounds are able to make the neighborhood home and participate in its economic life. Aging buildings are necessary in order to be able to host non-profits, artist studios, and affordable housing units. Older buildings and lower rents create opportunities for news businesses to gain their footing.

Too often, when a neighborhood is ‘up-and-coming’, developers seek to tear down what exists and install sleek new [expensive] architecture. This displaces lower-income tenants, is visually repetitive, and alters the character that caused the neighborhood to flourish in the first place. New development is important, but space must be left for economic diversity.

Four. Population Density

“There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes a dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.”

Above all else, Jacobs’ book is a love letter to density in a time during which people still believed that density meant dangerous tenement housing, crime, and disease. As she wrote with great sass:

“Advances in fields less moribund [meaning at the point of death] than city planning… such as medicine, sanitation and epidemiology, nutrition and labor legislation, have profoundly revolutionized dangerous and degrading conditions that were once inseparable from high-density city life.”

In our modern reality, density supports a diverse economic life. While suburbia can only support the economic demand of the majority, cities have the luxury of supporting a variety of cultures, scenes, and industries. This provides opportunities for establishments ranging from Ethiopian restaurants to hip microbreweries to co-exist, share customers, and make the city an attractive place to live.

Moving Forward

None of these changes come overnight. Great neighborhoods are built over time and continually evolve. The trick is encouraging population stability and retaining economic diversity to allow people to build a neighborhood that works for them.

Know of a successful and diverse city district? Share your example below.

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About the Author: Michelle Stockwell is a senior political science major at Hendrix College. She aspires to be a bold, sassy, and self-educated writer just like Jane Jacobs.