[Strangelet]

Urban planning.

Incidentally I didn't buy this book in barnes and nobel, i bought it at Pages, an independent bookstore in toronto. it was one of the only new book they stocked. They aren't buying more books because they have to move because they can no longer afford the rent. Their location, queen street, used to be a haven for artists and their independent stores. That means yuppies wanted to live near there to be hip. But with the yuppies comes the chain box stores to support their consumer habits. All of a sudden, real estate rises in value, forcing the artists who were just renting to move out. the same thing is happening in brooklyn and god knows where.

Jane Jacobs is a house hold name in Canada. Her ideas have been bundled up into a system called new urbanism. which basically means making urban planning around multi use, work and living is combined. the idea is to design things such that people are forced to interact with each other.

During the heat waves of 95 in chicago, it was discovered that two neighborhoods, each with the same number of elderly, had drastically different rates of mortality. Jacobs cites the reason is that one neighborhood was more socially connected than the other. So people knew who the elderly were and had no problems checking on them.