- [Narrator] Think of a
great street in your city.
Older buildings with shops and restaurants
on the ground level
and apartments and offices above.
Lots of people walking
around, meeting with friends,
and bumping into strangers.
A great street is a
destination in its own right.
Yet in most cities, streets like these
have become outdated.
- Jump
- [Narrator] You'll need a car to get
to where you're going.
Once you pick up on it, you can realize
how a city's design can
really change your life
and how it influences everything
from a city's vitality, to
housing costs, even crime.
But how did we get to a place where
so many American city streets are bad?
To figure out how American
cities got this way,
you need to go back to the 1920s and '30s,
when the modernist planning establishment
began tightening zoning regimes
that neatly separated commercial,
industrial, and residential buildings.
The stated purpose of zoning laws
was to prevent nuisances and pollution
where people lived, but
also to guide developers
to build and buyers to live
in the single family home,
widely viewed by city planners
as incubators of the
ideal American family.
To do this, city governments
carved out wide swaths
of city land and confined
them to single family homes,
typically restricting
residency to one family.
This presented some major problems.
- When you zone something
for a single family home
as opposed to multi-family homes,
it has the effect of making
housing units more expensive.
- [Narrator] That's economics Sandy Ikeda
and he says that one of the main effects
of single family zoning was
to lower the availability
of low income housing.
- Very simply, it's more
complicated than this,
but if you have a lot
which can accommodate
one big house, let's
say 4,000 square feet,
if you could divide that
up in to four smaller units
of 1,000 square feet
each, the individual units
could be sold or rented
out at a lower price.
- [Narrator] Take a
look at this zoning map
of San Francisco with
the single family zoning
colored in red.
The city is dominated by
single family zoned housing
and that's a major reason why
San Francisco's housing costs
are the highest in the United States.
Cities across the country have begun
to build out by heavily regulating
the availability to build up,
creating scarcity at
attractive city centers
and bidding up the price
closer to city downtowns.
- The supply has not kept up
with this increasing demand.
You want people to live in dwellings
that have a minimum size.
But the consequence of that is people
who can't afford that minimum size
won't be able to live in those dwellings.
What are they going to do?
Is there a logical stopping point
to minimum housing sizes?
Why don't you make the minimum
house size 2,000 square feet?
Then we'd all live in palaces.
Or 4,000 square feet, let's make everybody
in New York City live
in a single family home.
That will solve the problem.
- [Narrator] Single family zoning laws
of the '20s and '30s went a long way
to realize the vision of cities
held by modernist planners.
But they weren't enough.
By the 1950s and '60s,
cities weren't just blocking
traditional urban
neighborhoods from being built.
Armed with new federal backing,
cities gained license to rezone
and condemn neighborhoods as blight,
often wiping out entire neighborhoods
for minor building design infractions,
like not having wide
enough lawn separating
each dwelling.
This had the added and
often deliberate affect
of forcing out poorer minority residents
from the city, who tended to live
in denser multi-family homes
that were disliked by
most modernist planners.
- The explicit reason
was to promote safety.
Later on, many of these zoning codes
were used to segregate populations,
either explicitly by race
or by cultural backgrounds.
- [Narrator] In place
of these neighborhoods,
the modernists favored further
single family home building,
but they also favored long, wide streets
and narrow sidewalks, with the goal
of reshaping American cities
around the automobile.
They would erect massive
civic centers and plazas,
sometimes with the
primary goal of achieving
architectural aesthetic, often forgetting
the people they were architecting for.
This is when the modernist
planners drew a challenger.
- A real rebel that everyone points to,
and rightly so, is Jane Jacobs.
- [Narrator] Uncredentialed
and mostly self-trained,
Jane Jacobs was a
renegade to the status quo
in city planning.
- Who in 1961 published
her great book called
"The Death and Life of
Great American Cities."
The opening sentence of which is,
"this is an attack on urban planning".
- [Narrator] According to Jacobs,
the modernist planners failed to see
the city at street level and saw cities
only from their maps and dioramas.
- She started going to
some of these places
inspired by modernist urban planning
and realized they're not being used
by the people the way that the designers
had intended them.
In fact, many of them were
not being used at all.
The response she got was something like,
well, people are too dumb
to know how to use this.
She thought, this is crazy.
They should be figuring
out how people actually
use space and then designing those spaces
in a way that will accommodate those uses.
- [Narrator] Jacobs hated
the modernist wide streets
and narrow sidewalks.
She condemned their zoning codes
that separated residents from the bustle
of restaurants and businesses.
She warned that these features
would isolate people from one another
and made cities unwalkable,
making streets less safe
and weakening the social capital
that springs from unplanned interactions
of pedestrians.
She wrote, "This isn't
the rebuilding of cities,
this is the sacking of cities".
Jacobs focused on how many
of the modernist plans
had become more important than the people
they were drawn for.
In a famous essay, she said that,
"There is no logic that
can be superimposed
on the city; people make it,
and it is to them, not buildings,
that we must fit our plans".
This people-centric perspective
to urban design led Jacobs to emphasize
the importance of
allowing mixed use zoning
where businesses and residential
buildings intermingled
and allow residents to walk to businesses.
Jacobs noticed that
the more people walking
on a street, the more
interesting a street becomes,
attracting what she
called eyes on the street,
making residents feel
safe from potential crime.
Instead of long endless streets,
Jacobs emphasized the
importance of short blocks
which encouraged pedestrians
to make frequent turns
and take alternating
routes, giving businesses
off the beaten path a fighting chance
by not favoring any
one path to begin with.
With businesses scattered
throughout neighborhoods,
the city suddenly opens up to pedestrians.
- If you understand how a city works,
or an economy works, it's a result
of a lot of people
following their own plans,
it generates outcomes
that nobody can predict.
- [Narrator] This
unpredictability of people
should make us wary of imposing
intricate plans on them.
So what can city designers do to avoid
making the mistakes of the past?
- I would say be aware
of the consequences.
Try to take into account the costs
of what you're doing.
The true city, where
experimentation goes on,
where you have face-to-face contact,
where you have social capital,
cannot be completely planned.
You have to be modest.
You can't make people use something
in exactly the way that you wanted to.
- [Narrator] The idea of neatly designing
our cities is tempting.
But learning to appreciate the immersion
and complex order of the people
who live in them might
help us better shape them
for the future.
