This stunning, wide-ranging interview with Jane "Death and Life of the Great American Cities" Jacobs makes me terribly homesick for Toronto.
Our downtown keeps getting better all the time. Even the sidewalks are being widened here and there. Instead of gas stations, you can hardly find a gas station anymore. Buildings have been put in, and often very nice buildings. And there's lots of people living downtown now. That was a distinct policy of the city. We had a remarkable mayor, whose name was Barbara Hall, She went to work to get the zoning and get the whole vision of this changed and believe me, it was very hard for her to educate her planning department to be able to accept this or do this. The various visions she had were excellent…
Here's what I think is happening. I look at the, what happened at the end of Victorianism. Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "it's the twentieth century, is this suitable for the twentieth century." This happened before the first world war and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. That was one of the first places it was happening. But it was a reaction to a great extent against Victorianism. There was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.
(via Steven Berlin Johnson!)
