The Pleasure of Culture
Our cities belong to us!
Although Jane Jacobs is a prominent figure in America when thinking about urban battles against destructive developmental policies and eradication of our communities and cultures, she is only one of many generational solutions! Our cities belong to us! We can be new examples to what we desire to see because we live in these cities everyday! As a person that has recevied an education in Urban and Regional Development, I've learned that there are many solutions that people at the higher levels refuse to see and that needs to change NOW!
Whether it be new building ideas, new color ways from the usual "grey" building style, new parks, new spaces for people to gather and enjoy their city or other new amenities, or improvement of current amenities that people can create solutions from within community. We have many palpable solutions that we have access to right in our own communities. The question isn't when or what but how? That's for you to figure out in your own local and regional capacities. “Only by adopting an explicitly historical perspective can such fundamental structure be revealed. The identification of shared properties in past and present systems has been facilitated by research traditions that define cities (and settlements more broadly) as networks of social interaction embedded in physical space.” (Ortman, SG et. al., 2020).
Fortunately, there have been instances of locality being stripped from locals and prevention of regions being protected way at the same time this started to became a prevalent issue here in Tucson, so there's methods of comparison as to how to protect your locality. Jane Jacobs, who was a writer who migrated to Greenwich village in NYC, was a advocate against urban renewal, now gentrification, in spite of Robert Moses. A city municipal worker who wanted to destroy New York by pushing various freeways through Manhattan and other places such as the Bronx, and a creator of Public Housing, which often targeted minorities. “Jacobs advocated for mixed-use, human-scale streetscapes, looked at cities from the perspective of how people interact with each other in urban spaces, and argued persuasively against top-down urban renewal projects that did not take usability or human scale into account” (Goldberg, B. (2022, August 8).