Downtown is for People

This is a great, long read, pulled from Fortune’s archive. Jane Jacobs’ 1958 perspective is as unique as it gets: an on-the-ground report from post-war America, where the entire country was an architectural and urban-design sandbox, and Manhattan was the main project.

There are so many great take-aways from the article, but my favorite is her spot-on observation of the city block:

Believing their block maps instead of their eyes, developers think of downtown streets as dividers of areas, not as the unifiers they are. Weighty decisions about redevelopment are made on the basis of what is a “good” or “poor” block, and this leads to worse incongruities than the most unenlightened laissez faire.

Streets aren’t moats separating private islands, they’re fragile isthmuses connecting vital resources.