In Urban Watch, Orson Scott Card summarizes Jan Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, listing the four conditions for a vibrant downtown:
- First, a vital downtown has to have mixed primary uses — retail, office, residential, and even small manufactories, all of them sustaining each other and many secondary uses, like schools, dining, and entertainment.
- Second, you have to have small blocks.
- Third, you’ve got to have old buildings.
- Fourth, a vibrant downtown has to have a dense concentration of people.
I don’t think most suburbanites realize what zoning means to their day-to-day lives:
Every store outside of downtown has to be located in the middle of a parking lot, so you can’t conveniently walk from one to another. And the stores are all grouped together, completely separated from the places where people live.This didn’t just “happen.” This is required by our government.
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The old pattern was to have three-story buildings where the ground floor was retail or manufacturing, and the upper floors were professional offices, small manufacturing, or — most important — residential. These uses tended to be bunched together on short streets, but around every corner there would be residential streets with retail mostly on the corners.Now, though, our zoning laws prohibit the building of retail buildings with residential apartments upstairs. And the buildings have to be set back from the street and separated from each other by big parking lots.