Along with the portrait of choreographed daily comings and goings of West Villagers that Jacobs romanticised, her book conveyed a larger hope to recreate socioeconomically diverse neighbourhoods with small business and localised governance. Jacobs’s dream was based on older cities with compact streets mixing commercial and residential zoning. Examining the winding heterogenous laneways of Europe – as compared with the straight lines of ascendant North American modernism – Jacobs saw diversity in density. From population to building style to economic function, she sought a kind of city that transformed with each step one took through it, rather than places dominated by monofunctional land use for miles on end. In time, this formulation would be taken up not only for its social goals of neighbourliness and coexistence but broader objectives of immigrant integration, small business incubation, and alternative transportation to meet sustainability goals.
Jacobs’s ideas about density went, in a matter of 20 years, from an outsider critique of the hubris of urban planning to a foundational tenet of planning schools. The philosophy of New Urbanism, made popular in the 1980s and ’90s, was a refocusing of urban design on building dynamic public spaces that maximised interactions between residents. This meant smaller shops that were accessible on foot (or, at least, better integrated with the streets around them, rather than surrounded by a sea of parking); more green spaces; and a far-reaching overhaul of zoning to mix commercial and residential functions whenever possible. New Urbanism was enthusiastically heralded by urban planners as a more sustainable way to build cities that returned to pre-automotive times with bustling street life, while community leaders praised the movement for its sociable and democratic qualities: bringing people back to the urban agorae. The broad narrative trajectory of the city through the 20th century – from villain to hero – seemed complete.
The problem was that New Urbanism remained largely confined within the walls of architecture schools: a kind of on-paper architecture that was ignored by real-estate developers who were busy quickly erecting identical, single-family homes on exurban sites far from stores and mass transit. As the US continued to sprawl in the 1990s with no sign of densification – nor mass-transit investment or mixed-use development – some critics began to see the New Urbanist philosophy as a mere design shell to be slapped onto strip malls and suburban neighbourhoods. To some, it was an easy way to claim innovation by adding a bench and calling it a plaza, or putting a few colourfully painted townhouses into a subdivision and calling it ‘urban’. The true potential of New Urbanist ideas remained in the halls and studios of architecture schools.