Social Space and the Planning of Residential Areas

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. This is the laboratory in which city planning should have been learning and forming and testing its theories. Instead the practitioners and teachers of this discipline…have ignored the study of success and failure in real life, have been incurious about the reasons for unexpected success, and are guided instead by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of towns, suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs, and imaginary dream cities – from anything but cities themselves – Jane Jacobs (1961:6).

The livability of residential environments has become one of the most urgent challenges facing our industrial cities. Despite the volumes of scientific research, experimentation, and evaluation, our understanding of the problem remains embarrassingly incomplete. Its very complexity baffles the investigator. One merely carves out slices or the problem and investigates them according to the concepts and procedures of specific disciplines.