City planning
There's an interesting article mentioned in (East Bay) Zack's diary about Richard Register. Maybe I will pick up those Jane Jacobs books and start trying to get a perspective on city planning. Some of the most interesting people I know are architects.
"People found the city because they love other people."(Dar Williams, "Mortal City")
Register thinks that cities should be dense and small, so that people can use public transit and so that they won't sprawl and consume lots of land area.
It's interesting to think about different factors which have environmental impacts (and also affect the cost of living in a city, and the subjective feeling, and the appearance and culture of the city). So one thing is how much land is used; another is how the land is used; another is whether people have to drive; another is how fast the transportation is; another (stressed by Jane Jacobs, I remember) is how well commingled different kinds of things are.
One nice thing about the Mission District is that there are restaurants, supermarkets, laundromats, and similar things near my home. That means that I don't need to drive or even take transit to get to those things. But that doesn't mean that the Mission is particularly dense or that it's laid out the way Richard Register might prefer.
