Urban Design Manifesto

AUTHORS:

1) ALLAN B. JACOBS

Allan b. Jacobs is an urban designer, renowned for his publications and research on urban design. His well-known paper "towards an urban design manifesto", written with Donald appleyard describes how cities should be laid out.

Prior to teaching at Berkeley, professor Jacobs taught at the university of Pennsylvania, and worked on planning projects in the city of Pittsburgh and for the ford foundation in Calcutta, India, and spent eight years as director of the San Francisco department of city planning. Honours include a Guggenheim fellowship, the Berkeley citation, and the Kevin lynch award from the Massachusetts institute

• LIVABILITY. A city should be a place where everyone can live in relative comfort. Most people want a kind of sanctuary for their living environment, a place where they can bring up children, have privacy, sleep, eat, relax, and restore themselves. This means a well managed environment relatively devoid of nuisance, overcrowding, noise, danger, air pollution, dirt, trash, and other unwelcome intrusions.

• IDENTITY AND CONTROL. People should feel that some part of the environment belongs to them, individually and collectively, some part for which they care and are responsible, whether they own it or not. The urban environment should be an environment that encourages people to express themselves, to become involved, to decide what they want and act on it. Like a seminar where everybody has something to contribute to communal discussion, the urban environment should encourage participation. Urbanites may not always want this. Many like the anonymity of the city, but we are not convinced that the freedom of anonymity is a desirable freedom. It would be much better if people were sure enough of themselves to stand up and be

Certain goals for urban life were stated and to achieve these goals, five prerequisites of a ‘sound’ urban environment were identified.

Jacobs & Appleyard suggested seven goals ‘essential for the future of a good urban environment’:

• LIVEABILITY

– A city should be a place where everyone can live in relative comfort.

•IDENTITY AND CONTROL

– People should feel that some part of the environment belongs to them, individually and collectively – some part for which they care and are responsible, whether they own it or not.

• ACCESS TO OPPORTUNITIES, IMAGINATION AND JOY

– People should find the city a place where they can break from traditional moulds, extend their experience, meet new people, learn other viewpoints, and have fun

• AUTHENTICITY AND MEANING

– People should be able to understand their city (or other people 's cities), its basic layout, public functions and institutions; they should be aware of its opportunities.

•COMMUNITY AND PUBLIC LIFE

– Cities should encourage participation of their citizens in community and public life.

•URBAN SELF-RELIANCE

– Increasingly, cities will have to become more self-sustaining in their uses of energy and other scarce