Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [153]
As well as a high concentration of human activity, the successful arrival city needs to provide space for spontaneity. In a new-migrant community, a given patch of land might need to be a residence, a shop, a small factory, a gathering-place, a place of worship, or any combination of these from time to time, and it needs to change and evolve. Most Western urbanites nowadays understand that downtown-core neighborhoods need to be spontaneous, organic, and flexible. Unfortunately, the neighborhoods where newcomers arrive are rarely allowed the same creativity, and their planners remain devoted to rigidly separated uses of property and land.
We have learned what is wrong with this zoning approach from hard experience. The urbanist Jane Jacobs, who spent the 1950s studying and admiring the works of these big-project planners, was sent in 1958 to report on a huge slum-redevelopment high-rise project in Philadelphia, built using rigid zoning, low housing density, and broad public squares. “The drawings looked wonderful with all these little people in them,” she told me years later. “And I went down to see it. It was just like the picture—except all those little people weren’t in it. The only person in it, in the whole thing, for blocks, was a little boy—one lone little boy who was sort of disconsolately kicking at a tire.” The rest of the new residents had wandered back to the last remaining stretch of the old “slum” neighborhood (a failed African American arrival city) to sit on the front steps of the nineteenth-century row houses. Such social gatherings were no longer possible in the new apartments or the useless, anonymous public square.4 Despite its poverty, the old neighborhood’s density, its mix of business and residences, and its privately owned space and access to the street gave it a potential for human mixing, mutual security, and entrepreneurship that could never exist in a low-density project. From the beginning, its residents knew it would become “the projects,” a place without hope of arrival.
Jacobs was inspired by this shock of realization to write The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which argued that urban neighborhoods should be treated as organic entities, permitted to grow, change, and develop functions as their residents desire, without restrictions on usage, intensity, or change. This liberal, organic view of urbanism was shared by the sociologist William Whyte, who demonstrated the importance of density and concentration, and the architect-planner Oscar Newman, whose 1972 study, Defensible Space, demonstrated that dense, privately owned spaces with access to the street created a community sense of self-surveillance and security.5 These ideas influenced a generation of urban thinkers and played a huge role in the revitalization of the urban cores of Western cities in the 1970s and ’80s.
The urban core can take care of itself nowadays. The place where these liberating ideas are most needed today is in the migrant-packed margins. “The task,” Jacobs wrote of those downtown neighborhoods, “is to promote the city life of city people, housed, let us hope, in concentrations both dense enough and diverse enough to offer them a decent chance at developing city life.”6 Density, spontaneity, and diversity of use are hard to find in the banlieues difficiles of Paris, the apartment-block housing projects of North America’s outer-ring suburbs, the council estates of many British cities or the Plattenbau quarters of German cities. And these, sadly, are precisely the sorts of districts where rural migrants arrive. Changing this rigid thinking is expensive and difficult, but the stakes are high: It can make the difference between a new middle class and a violent, angry outcast community. Today, a few cities are beginning to spend the money. After the British writer Alice Coleman observed the damage done to social mobility and the “social malaise” caused by the isolating design