What Makes Great Neighborhoods Work?

Not all neighborhoods are created equal. What sets the best ones apart? Find out the mistakes city planners made in the past and the two foundational principles that guide Brick & Bond in developing places people love to live.

Venice recently introduced an entrance fee to visit the city. It’s an effort to control the overwhelming crowds of tourists that continually fill its streets. Meanwhile, cities elsewhere are offering incentives as high as $15,000 to attract new residents. 

As these examples illustrate, there are cities where people love to be — and others we aren’t naturally drawn to. What makes the difference? Why do some neighborhoods draw us in like a magnet? 

Great neighborhoods have some things in common. When we know what they are, we can design and develop urban settings where people want to spend time. In recent decades, there has been a movement dedicated to rediscovering the principles that underlie successful neighborhoods built in the past so we can cultivate similar communities in the present.  

Keep reading to discover what makes great neighborhoods work.

How Not to Build

One thing obvious to casual observation is that America has plenty of neighborhoods that don’t function very well. 

This is somewhat surprising, since there is a long tradition of careful thought about urban design that stretches all the way back to the ancient Greeks. The Romans knew the art of planning thriving cities, as did those living in the Middle Ages, despite the more organic nature of urban development at the time. During the Renaissance, city planning took on new importance, with careful attention given to how the built environment can support a dynamic civic life.

This tradition, developing its principles and practices over time, gave us most of the cities and neighborhoods people love to live in and visit today. 

The established patterns were disrupted, however, as the modern world began to emerge around 1900. Rapid population growth, especially in cities, led to new and complex challenges for urban design. Squalid living conditions and public health concerns inspired a new generation of planners to approach the problem of the city from a fresh perspective. 

With an engineer’s mindset, they sought to impose a rational order on the chaos of cities, creating large-scale plans aimed at greater efficiency, cleanliness, and safety. One striking example from this era was famed architect Le Corbusier’s plan for central Paris. He envisioned leveling many blocks of the historic city to make way for massive skyscrapers housing thousands of residents each, surrounded by wide green spaces.

This new approach took over planning across the U.S. It gave rise to zoning — the division of cities into single-purpose areas like residential and commercial — and to a tendency to ignore what has worked in the past in favor of novel forms of development. 

But when plans like Le Corbusier’s were put into practice, they tended to create dysfunctional neighborhoods no one wanted to live in. Critics began to suspect we’d taken a wrong turn.

Rediscovering the Principles for Thriving Neighborhoods

One of these early critics was Jane Jacobs. In her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she suggested we need a new starting place. Instead of beginning with an engineer’s idea of a rationally planned city, why not observe successful neighborhoods to see what makes them work?       

This commitment to investigate actual human communities and to learn from the past animates a new generation of city planners. After decades of study and observation, a consensus has formed around some of the key features that great neighborhoods have in common. These features cluster around two key ideas.

1. Thriving Neighborhoods Are Human-Centered 

In the 20th century, city planning began to give a lot of attention to the needs of automobiles. These would often determine things like the layout, street widths, street connections, and so on. The requirements of cars, not people, determined the broad outlines of development. Great neighborhoods, in contrast, start with the needs of people and create conditions that promote thriving. 

Much follows from this. For instance, a central human need is for community. Built environments that are walkable can help create it by providing opportunities for casual interactions with our neighbors. We also need beauty, which means appreciating the importance of aesthetics in the design of individual buildings and whole developments. The scale of design matters, too. A massive box store might feel fine when you’re driving by it at 60 miles per hour, but if you have to walk past it, the monotonous, unbroken facade is sterile and oppressive. 

2. Thriving Neighborhoods Are Mixed Use

From the perspective of some, one of the most significant missteps of urban planning in the 20th century was the nearly universal imposition of single-function zoning. From the point of view of efficiency, this seems sensible. It means neatly separating housing from busy commercial areas or noisy and smelly industrial ones. Moreover, there are times when zoning is important to guide development in ways that protect residents, property values, and the overall functionality of a city.

In practice, however, it can have several negative consequences. For one, it reduces the everyday human contact so important for a sense of community. People leave their houses in the morning to drive to distant and disparate parts of the city to work and shop, never encountering those they live near. Moreover, it means more time in the car to access what we need. Finally, it leaves each part of the city deserted during certain periods — neighborhoods during the day and commercial districts at night. This can promote crime and, again, reduce opportunities for human contact. 

Mixed-use neighborhoods, in contrast, are buzzing with life. Within them, it’s possible to have your home, your place of work, your grocery store, and the coffee shop where you meet with friends all within an easy walk. This is convenient, encourages people to be more active, promotes casual social contact, and builds a sense of community and belonging. Studies have found people who live in neighborhoods like this are happier, healthier, have more social connections, and have greater social trust.  

Catalyzing Great Neighborhoods

At Brick & Bond, we get excited about the potential of development to help create neighborhoods that align with the principles we’ve highlighted here. We believe in human-centered design that cultivates community and creates built environments where people love to live, work, and relax. 

If you’re looking for a partner to help you make your vision of a great neighborhood a reality, let’s start the conversation.