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Jane Jacobs on Montreal 1969, city planning chinwag

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I was never a huge fan of that Jane Jacobs guy. She gained fame, of course, by writing The Death and Life of Great .... zzz. sorry dozed off there for a bit.
    Her thing was that cities should be built to encourage street vitality, complete with granny knitting on the porch being a witness to potential crimes.
   I didn't get all the way through her book but I've concluded that I support the opposite concept, sorta like Le Corbusier: build towers to the sky and turn the rest of the land around it into fields laden with pumpkins and shallots, that's the way I'd go about it.
   The report above comes complete with a mumblecore preamble by a guy sounding like he was auditioning to narrate Dragnet.
   She praises Montreal for not building a highway along the waterside, although the Bonaventure Expressway pretty much fits that description.
   Jacobs has a bunch of criticism for Toronto but, of course, she chose to live there so yeah, I guess she didn't dislike it all that much.
    She also points out in the video that Montreal's expansion was supposedly halted by a reluctance to lend money to French-speaking entrepreneurs. I hadn't heard that really argued before but she runs with that ball.

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