What does Jane Jacobs have to do with orange?
Hint: “mixed-use”
by Star Childs @star_III
Today marks the Jane Jacobs centennial. Considering the significance of today, I’d like to share how I see the color orange tying Jane Jacobs and her beliefs to Citiesense and our mission to help local organizations attract a mix of uses.
I believe two fundamental components of cities are key to making a place great; both people and activities. Great cities are able to sustain a critical mass of people and different activities. As a result, these places actually attract more of each. In other words, there is a correlation between growth and places with a mix of land uses for different activities. In city planning terms, we call these places “mixed-use”.
Jane Jacobs was an influential writer and urban activist. She believed in community-centric approaches to the development of cities. Jacobs spent over 40 years advocating for mixed-use urban communities. She felt the city planning process should embrace a bottom-up analysis of a place. This type of thinking encouraged cities to adopt active community engagement on development strategies. In her seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she acknowledges the virtues of mixed-use development strategies;
“I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other parts of cities.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Happy 100th birthday, Jane Jacobs.
But WHY ORANGE?
Land use maps have been using a de facto standard color range to color-code specific uses on a map since the 1950’s. Maps generally use a different color for each of the major land-use categories. Yellows and reds are colors found in urban areas. Yellow represents residential land use and red represents commercial. A mixed-use urban area will have yellow and red uses on the same property. The result is a new land use color; the color orange.
So, while orange is not one of the original colors in the range, it became adopted into the range representing mixed-use by combining the reds and yellows for residential and commercial uses.
To tie this all together, at Citiesense we believe in mixed-use, community-centric development strategies. Part of our mission is to unlock opportunities for mixed-use development by leveraging technology. To achieve this, Citiesense works with local organizations in New York City. Our technology enables these groups to manage and share local knowledge about a place. A sustainable future depends on how we share information about places. Like Jane Jacobs, we believe empowering the right local groups with a voice in the development process is key to realizing the potential of mixed-use places and that future.
One of the local district groups we work with includes several city blocks in the neighborhood Jane Jacobs called home; Greenwich Village in Manhattan. I can’t help but wonder what Jane would say about Citiesense if she were here today thumbing around on the interactive Map using her iPhone and learning about all the mixed-use development happening in her local community.
