High Line Park NYC - Assignment Example

The High Line Park of New York is a prominent example, where Jacobs’s viewpoint appears to have been very effective and influential. Discussion Jane Jacobs, in her famous work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, attacked the contemporary theory of urban planning based on modernist view and furnished reasoned criticisms against the works of the renowned planners like Robert Moses who were pressing ahead with their rationalized urban planning schemes for different American cities. Jacobs’s works gained attention and credibility due to her approach that involved credible analytics to deal with the urban economic cultures of Western world.

A technical point that Jacobs focused on was the analyses of contemporary federal incentives and investments in the real estate sector. Contextual to this economic view of exploiting analytical data over investment patterns and government schemes, Jacobs further remarks, “The power to destroy which is possessed by authority over credit or by management of credit is negative: it is the power to withhold credit” (Jacobs, 295). In this way, Jacobs stands for decentralization and people oriented planning.

In the same context, Jacobs has explained an alternative analytical approach that could substitute this return on investment or ROI seeking economic policy. According to Jacobs, life in a city involves complex behavior of numerous individual variables which can be defined as a sort of “disorganized complexity” (Jacobs, 431, 436). From statistical point of view, Jacobs’s analytical approach can be regarded as seeming chaos. In economic sense, this seeming chaos of city life must be controlled by allowing flexibility instead of harnessing order and discipline.

For example, a remotely located children’s park in a planned city is actually more unsafe than the roadside playgrounds within a crowded residential locality. In the wake of modern research and analysis, Hoch et al from ICMA University appear to have interpreted Jacobs’s views in a more organized way. In the chapter on “Economic Analysis”, Hoch et al (119) advocate using a comparative analysis of a local economy (under planning) against the overall national economy and industrial patterns.

For example, say iron and steel industry in a country provides for 50% of the total employments generated there. In such circumstances, planning a city that has grown around a steel plant where only 10% of the residents are employed in the iron and steel industry can be troublesome. So the urban planner will need to calculate the day time and night time populations of the city separately so that the city’s importance in national economy can be better understood. Jacobs’s theory of having disorganized complexity in city life appears to be very relevant in this kind of urban scenarios.

Precondition to economic analyses Hoch et al, therefore, advocate for implementing descriptive statistical techniques so that inferences can be firmly grounded on the basis of dependable information. And the aim of all these analytical arrangements must focus on generating reasoned “decision-making criteria” (Hoch et al, 419) to address inequities and usher at better planning that would provide for appropriate capital improvements with regard to environmental factors as well. Benefits Keeping in mind the example of High Land Park in the New York City, it should be noted that accepting Jacobs’