You are here:
Jane Jacobs and ‘The Need for Aged Buildings’: Neighbourhood Historical Development Pace and Community Social Relations
Citation:
King, K. Jane Jacobs and ‘The Need for Aged Buildings’: Neighbourhood Historical Development Pace and Community Social Relations. Urban Studies. SAGE Publications, THOUSAND OAKS, CA, 50(12):1-18, (2013).
Impact/Purpose:
This paper first presents an overview of Jacobs’s concept of development pace and very briefly summarises research to date on community social relations, focusing on work linking housing and social behaviour. The analysis then operationalises historical development pace as a measure of the diversity of housing ages and uses this measure along with controls (individual sociodemographics and neighbourhood built and social characteristics) to predict four measures of neighbourly social relations in a multilevel framework using data representative of the city of Chicago in 2000.
Description:
Jacobs argued that grand planning schemes intending to redevelop large swaths of a city according to a central theoretical framework fail because planners do not understand that healthy cities are organic, spontaneous, messy, complex systems that result from evolutionary processes. She argued that a gradual pace of redevelopment would facilitate maintenance of existing interpersonal ties. This paper operationalises the concept of pace of development within a cross-sectional framework as the ‘age diversity of housing’. Analysis of a population-based multilevel community survey of Chicago linked with census housing data predicts individual perceptions of neighbourhood social relations (cohesion, control, intergenerational closure and reciprocal exchange). A gradual pace of redevelopment resulting in historical diversity of housing significantly predicts social relations, lending support to Jacobs’s claims.