Who Does the City Belong To? An Encounter with Jane Jacobs

Walking past a New York construction site, the narrator compares the rendering on the fence, with its gleaming towers and tiny people who never look tired, to the real sidewalk, where a worker eats standing and an elderly man searches for somewhere to sit, and in an imagined encounter Jane Jacobs asks where that man will sit in the new city. She tells him to begin with a person he can see, questions the shuttered shop he would gladly replace by asking what it sold and who shopped there, and asks him to identify what needs fixing before calling a change renewal. At an intersection the elderly man cannot finish crossing before the signal changes, and Jacobs shows that a city needs its designers, those who manage the street and those who cross it every day, and that disagreement among residents has to be understood. She asks who will be able to afford the rent of a replacement building, and sends the narrator back to the project image to look for the delivery worker, the wheelchair route, shade for a child and a seat that requires no purchase. He leaves with a notebook in which he has written to observe a place before changing it, ask those who use it and account for the cost of his decisions to their lives, and with the sense that he has finally begun designing from the ground.