“We shall have something solid to chew on if we think of city neighborhoods as mundane organs of self-government.  Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government.  And our successes are successes at localized self-government.  I am using self-government in its broadest sense, meaning both the informal and formal self-management of society.” Pg114

“Unfortunately orthodox planning theory is deeply committed to the ideal of supposedly cozy, inward-turned city neighborhoods.  In its pure form, the ideal is a neighborhood composed of about 7000 persons, a unit supposedly of sufficient size to populate an elementary school and to support convenience shopping and a community center.  This unit is then further rationalized into smaller grouping of a size scaled to the play and supposed management of children and the chitchat of housewives.  Although the “ideal” is seldom literally reproduced, it is the point of departure for nearly all neighborhood renewal plans, for all project building, for much modern zoning, and also for the practice of work done by today’s architectural-planning students, who will be inflicting their adaptations of it on cities tomorrow.” Pg 115 

Can work in small towns where everyone knows everyone and passes by each other multiple times a day etc, but in a large city with the same kind of numbers, there is no way of knowing who you are going to run into one day from the next.  Just because you may live next to someone doesn’t mean you will go to the same places or do the same things within the city that your “neighbor” does.

“the conception of neighborhoods in cities is meaning les – so long as we think of neighborhoods as being self-contained units to any significant degree, modeled upon town neighborhoods. Pg117

The Death and Life of Great American Cities   --Jane Jacobs

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mgoodwin@mgoodwinDESIGN.com