Slow and steady: Jane Jacobs and gradual neighborhood development

Katherine King, "Jane Jacobs and ‘The Need for Aged Buildings’: Neighbourhood Historical Development Pace and Community Social Relations," Urban Studies 50 (2013): 12

The take-away: This study uses statistical methods to evaluate Jane Jacobs’ hypothesis that gradual neighborhood development predicts a more sociable climate. It finds significant relationships between the diversity of housing age—a statistical proxy for Jacobs’ ‘development pace’—and four measures of neighborly social relations.    

Abstract: 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.

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