Jane in the Jungle: Jane Jacobs and the Need for Small Blocks

One of the recurring themes in The Death and Life of Great American Cities is the need for short city blocks and frequent streets. Jacobs contends that

Long blocks tend almost always to be physically self-isolating.

She goes on to say that foot traffic — as well as the commerce pedestrians can support — is increased when people have multiple routes.

By contrast, long blocks sort all people along a few channels. This logically reduces the number of people who actually choose to walk anywhere in the first place — an idea mostly hinted at in chapter 9 but that is demonstrated in most suburbs — and prevents economically vibrant, mixed use neighborhoods because there are only a few places with a critical mass of potential consumers. Jacobs writes,

Where differing primary uses are involved, long blocks are apt to thwart effective mixture in exactly the same way. They automatically sort people into paths that meet too infrequently, so that different uses very near each other geographically are, in practical effect, literally blocked off from one another.

Translation: stores, and neighborhoods generally, suffer without frequent streets.

Jacobs would be pleased to know that what was an unusual idea in her youth has become more or less accepted orthodoxy today. New York City is even making it official by bisecting a long block with “6 1/2 Avenue” along a previously unofficial shortcut. I advocated something similar for Provo in this post. This topic was also tackled in this post, where Atlanta’s massive and infrequent streets were contrasted against the small lanes of Florence.

But unfortunately, both New York, Provo and many other cities in America were laid out at a time when city planners evidently didn’t understood the importance of frequent streets. So instead, Provo has long, wide, high-speed boulevards like Freedom and University Ave. Anyone who has driven these streets knows that they’re hardly bastions of economic vitality.

And there’s no reason to believe they should thrive as they’re currently designed. As Jacobs writes,

Long blocks, in their nature, thwart the potential advantages that cities offer to incubation, experimentation, and many small or special enterprises, insofar as these depend on drawing their customers or clients from among much larger cross-sections of passing public. Long block also thwart the principle that if city mixtures of use are to be more than a friction on maps, they must result in different people, bent on different purposes, appearing at different times, but using the same streets.

Freedom Blvd. This street includes a long stretch with no cross walks, high speed limits, and few intersecting streets. Is it any wonder that a new development nearby has both failed to fill up and also experience an extremely high turnover rate?