Looking at Cities

It's been a busy week of reading. It took me longer than I wanted to finish this book, but the next book flew by. Alan B. Jacobs's 1985 tour through the streets of the Bay Area and Italy wasn't riveting, I have to confess. That's not to say there wasn't good information, and I think I get why MIT included an excerpt from it in their intro to planning course.

This book would be especially useful if you were interesting in getting into urban planning, but had never set foot outside to actually explore an urban area. I'm not simply being snarky here as I could imagine the occasional undergrad not having really explored an urban environment. Unfortunately, a lot of the observations were pretty obvious:

"Grates, grilles, alarm boxes, and home alert signs are age-old indicators of safety and crime issues as perceived by residents."

No shit?

Other parts were less obvious, but I can't say that anything in this book really shocked me. MIT's intent in the early readings of their introductory course is clearly to get planning students to look outside at their own cities (probably Boston for most students). That goal makes a lot of sense. Urban planners should be comfortable walking through urban environments. After all, walking through an area that ineffably gives a bad vibe is likely to invite planning policies that displace poor and minority communities. That would be bad.

All that said, I'm not really interested in reporting much of the detail of this book. In part because it was a bit lackluster compared to the previous book, and in part because I'm eager to write about the next book which was in the same vein, but much more fun and interesting for me.