Chapter 11&12 (The need for concentration and Some myths about diversity)

In chapter 11 (The need for concentration) Jacobs had been mention the wrong way of city planer and their disciples looked at “highdensityandovercrowding” as slums and the meaning of over crowding (more than one person living in a room). But, from her views, high population density does not mean over crowding such as slum and have high density does not mean that the city has been success. As she point out, some of the high density are successful, some are not; like Greenwich Village in Manhattan, North Beach-Telegraph in San Francisco and so on. And there are many cities have low density are slums as in New York, Oakland, and Detroit. However, the population density is not the whole point of diversity. The reason for people gathered in concentration is; the grater population density is, the grater diversity it has, the better opportunity it has.

In chapter 12 (Some myths about diversity). Diversity make city alive. It means that neighborhoods or cities should be mixture, should have differences, whatever it is, like old and new buildings. As she mentions at chapter 8, old and new buildings have mixture of use, they are an economic necessity, old buildings have low rents and new buildings represent high construction cost, have high rents. And those mixture neighborhoods tended to be more successful than those are not. However, mixture does not mean that they must be “bad” or “ugly”. Homogeneity is monotonous and bored. Thus diversity is needed.