An Anonymous Crowd

[Pangloss]

Pangloss, I think, mentioned Jane Jacobs she maintained that citys are not designed for people they are designed mainly for commerce and vehicle traffic, and they are. Our large urban areas are dirty, fast, noisey and they don't get dark. They are very expensive in that everything consumed in them must be imported and they are power holes, they bleed energy. Big citys are probably soon to be things of the past. Water and fuel to maintain them simply won't be allocated to unproductive places like citys.

Darkbeaver:

Jacobs said nothing of the kind.

She pointed to good design, and why it is good, where it is, and how it happened.

She pointed to bad design, and why it is bad, where it is, and how it happened.

She took into account both large and small scale economies, transportation, zoning, class and race mixing, work and recreation, public spaces and the environment.

She proposed policies to preserve and encourage good planning, and suggested ways to fix bad planning.

All of this in 1961 - ten years before the pope suggested somebody might want to look at the problem.

Pangloss

 

[Pangloss]

Darkbeaver -

Cities are also the most efficient place to have a whole lot of people live. If all 7 or so billion of us chose to live an agrarian lifestyle, there would likely be nothing left for any other animals on the land.

Services are cheaper in cities, apartment towers use fewer resources per person housed to build, maintain, heat and water/sewer. They also use less land.

The disabled can be better cared for in cities. Try to wheelchair through the woods dude. Ridiculous, I know - but it makes a point.

Not everybody can, or should, have their 40 acres and a mule.

Pangloss

 

[darkbeaver]

Darkbeaver:

Jacobs said nothing of the kind.

She pointed to good design, and why it is good, where it is, and how it happened.

She pointed to bad design, and why it is bad, where it is, and how it happened.

She took into account both large and small scale economies, transportation, zoning, class and race mixing, work and recreation, public spaces and the environment.

She proposed policies to preserve and encourage good planning, and suggested ways to fix bad planning.

All of this in 1961 - ten years before the pope suggested somebody might want to look at the problem.

Pangloss

Acctually I heard two lectures from Jacobs this summer and I could swear she said what I said she said.

 

[Pangloss]

Darkbeaver - then you are one of the truly lucky to have seen her just before she died. A great loss. Was it a talk about her last book, "Dark Age Ahead"?

My comments are based on her book - she might have changed what she was saying (she had, rather, earned the right to be a cranky old lady) in her last lectures.

Pangloss

 

[Libra Girl]

Curiosity, Zan and sanctus.

Gosh, now I am agonising over what to say in reply… and that’s good, because I see it as another hurdle to a reserved and retiring nature, that I can, and will, overcome.


I won’t babble on embarrassingly, ( my apologies to you sanctus, for going off topic ) but would just like to say thank you to you all for the kind words of support and encouragement. I feel quite blessed. Thank you.

 

[sanctus]

Curiosity, Zan and sanctus.

Gosh, now I am agonising over what to say in reply… and that’s good, because I see it as another hurdle to a reserved and retiring nature, that I can, and will, overcome.


I won’t babble on embarrassingly, ( my apologies to you sanctus, for going off topic ) but would just like to say thank you to you all for the kind words of support and encouragement. I feel quite blessed. Thank you.

no apologies necessary. And by the way, I do appreciate, as an artist myself, that as being part of your equation. Artists tend to be withdrawn in many ways because of that inner voice. Even me, I might talk a great deal, but I tend to rarely talk about anything private or about myself.

 

[Libra Girl]

no apologies necessary. And by the way, I do appreciate, as an artist myself, that as being part of your equation. Artists tend to be withdrawn in many ways because of that inner voice. Even me, I might talk a great deal, but I tend to rarely talk about anything private or about myself.

Yes, you are very perceptive... privacy, to me, has always been something to look upon as sacred. Not necessarily as a defense mechanism, more, I believe, as a need to truly see, as an artist does, that which can only be achieved by isolation. I don't think I am making sense here, I am not as articulate as you, it's hard to explain. I was an only child, and I believe that that circumstance, combined with an artistic nature, inevitably led to the person that I have become today.