From
Local Cities, Global Problems: Jane Jacobs in an Age of Global Change
But the influence of communication technology is beginning to have an
impact at the neighborhood scale as well. Jacobs wrote that "word does
not move around where public characters and sidewalk life are
lacking." Now it does. There are the people paused at the top of the
subway stairs, occupying two spaces at once, one physical, one
virtual. And in neighborhoods around the countrythis one in
particularcommunity online message boards and blogs are thriving,
entirely in parallel with news passed stoop to stoop.
The "in parallel" part is crucial. Outside.In, a website designed to
gather and organize neighborhood news, published a list of "America's
Top 10 Bloggiest Neighborhoods." What was striking (but perhaps not
surprising) is that all were living examples of the kind of places
Jacobs championed: Clinton Hill in Brooklyn, Portrero Hill in San
Francisco, Shaw in Washington. If the physical form of a neighborhood
is conducive to community, so is its virtual form. But the other
striking thing about the list was that all the neighborhoods were in a
state of changegentrifying or recently gentrified. It's certainly
demographic: a neat and obvious alignment of hipster and blogger. But
it also means that the newly emerging character of these places is
being forged, at least in part, online. These are incontrovertibly
real-world neighborhoods, but their community is as virtual as it is
physical. With each year, we get better at navigating between the two.
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