tiny town, originally uploaded by f.trainer

My block in Brooklyn plays a good Hudson Street—at least at first glance. Each morning, the cigar-store owner throws open his gate, the barber puts out his chairs, the baker begins her muffins, and the old man a few doors down takes up his surveillance from the second-floor window. When I make my own first entrance a little after seven, with the dog, the newspaperman calls me “boss.” It may all look like Jane Jacobs’s glorious sidewalk ballet, but this is no longer Jane Jacobs’s city.
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“I think we’re not too far off from recognizing that it’s a moral imperative to add density to any place with a transit stop,” believes Christopher Leinberger, a fellow at the Brookings Institution—displaying plenty of the modernist brio and contempt for the souls of cities that Jacobs fought. But I’m tending to agree. We are wedging ourselves between a rock and a hard place: between the pleasures of medium-density living (Greenwich Village, Park Slope, Toronto’s Annex) and the ecological necessity of even more density.

Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change