Welcome to Litsy!

💯💯💯

1. Yes! But I don't let it deter me from a book.
2. I found this for .99 cents at a Goodwill. It's mentioned in Severance by Ling Ma (one of my favorite reads last year), so I snatched it up.
3. Mainly NPR, John Oliver, WaPo, Bitch, CNN, the ether 💫
4. 3 days a week I hit the snooze button exactly 1 time at 4:55 AM. All the other days, my daughter is a human alarm clock that gets me up at 6:30-7:00.
5. @inthegreensandblues @ruthiella

Just started reading this wonderful book. Ms Jacobs nicely puts, and minces no words, how cities as urban thriving communities aid development of socially conscious human beings. Down with the garden cities and up with the stoop sitting, window hanging, Street ball playing populace. If my neighbors don‘t know@me and I them we form no neighborhood only decorate the street for the automobile.

These are #someoneelsesbooks, specifically they are my husband's bedside TBR. Tagged book is the one I think he's currently reading but he also keeps a more immediate bookstack in his backpack and the fact that this book is here and he is not means I could be wrong about that. He's a reader that jumps from book to book as his mood and interests shift but localism, community development, business, and Louisiana history are basically his wheelhouse.

#autumnreads #femaleheroes
I haven't read this yet but I think Jane Jacobs may be a hero of mine. I'm currently working my way through #The Power Broker about Robert Moses and anyone who stands up to him in support of my favourite city in the world, NYC, has to be a hero!

I had trouble staying alert while listening to Donna Rawlins narrate the 50th anniversary edition of this audiobook. It's over 18 hours long. Some good stuff, but in retrospect, I wish I had sought out a summary of Jane Jacobs' ideas instead.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.
[photo: Edmonton's City Hall plaza. My city has a thing for glass pyramids.]

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

- discussing Ebenezer Howards' Garden City

The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

A city street equipped to handle strangers...must have 3 main qualities:

First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space...

Second, there must be eyes upon the street...

And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

Jane Jacobs throwing it down. This is the chapter I didn't know I was looking for, and exactly what I needed this morning. It's been slow going, but I'm glad I didn't give up on this book.

When I found out a group was making and selling tiny Jane Jacobs dolls, I couldn't help myself. How cute is she?

I'm in Toronto for the day and found this tribute to Jane Jacobs in Victoria Memorial Square. My own city is undergoing major urban renewal projects and Jacobs's ideas are still very relevant.

Finally starting to read this on what would have been her 100th birthday.