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Re-Imagining the Public Realm Tuesday, April 12, 2005
Gladys Feld Helzberg Auditorium
Kansas City Public Library

Allan Jacobs was featured on KCUR-FM's "Up to Date", Apr. 12, 2005.

Fifth Avenue. The Champs-Elysées. Michigan Avenue. Market Street. Even Ward Parkway. Visitors to great cities around the world are often drawn to particular streets, places that help to define a city’s character and reputation. But do great streets simply happen, or can they be designed?

Great streets are no accident, according to Allan B. Jacobs, Prof. Emeritus of City Planning at the Univ. of California-Berkeley, and author of Great Streets (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995), a landmark publication that evaluates the urban design qualities that make classic streets worthy of emulation.

By studying acclaimed streets throughout the world, Jacobs has identified factors that help to explain how certain streets contribute to the look, feel, and comfort of an urban experience. According to Jacobs, great streets not only can be designed, but these qualities also can be written into the framework of a city’s planning and development policies to help strengthen the public realm – the streets, sidewalks, plazas and parks that define the character of great cities.

In addition to his work on great streets, Jacobs also has explored how multi-way boulevards – roadways that separate higher-speed through traffic from controlled intersections – can become vital arteries that simultaneously accommodate pedestrians, automobiles, and bicyclists. Jacobs has contributed to the design and re-planning of several such boulevards, including roadways being contemplated to replace former freeway segments in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Vancouver, British Columbia.

Daniel Serda, executive director of the Kansas City Design Center, says that Jacobs’ insights will be very instructive for Kansas City planners contemplating modifications to the interstate highway loop circling Downtown’s Central Business District. "We are being deliberately provocative in asking Allan Jacobs to consider how a multi-way boulevard might be a useful design concept for rethinking entire segments of the downtown loop," he says. "We believe that even the highway overpasses might be re-designed so that they are more accessible and inviting to pedestrians and less of an obstacle between the River Market, CBD, and Crossroads District."

In conjunction with his visit to Kansas City, Professor Jacobs will lecture at KU’s School of Architecture and Urban Design in Lawrence, and provide insights from his work on the redesign of great streets and boulevards at a private gathering of civic and community leaders.

About Allan Jacobs

Allan Jacobs holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Miami University, and a Master of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania. He attended the Harvard Graduate School of Design and was a Fulbright Scholar in City Planning at University College, London. In addition to Great Streets, Jacobs is co-author (with his wife, Elizabeth Macdonald) of The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards (MIT Press, 2003), and author of Looking at Cities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985) and Making City Planning Work (Chicago, IL: American Planning Association, 1980) and a regular contributor to Places magazine, an acclaimed professional journal of urban design. He has won numerous international awards and honors, including the AIA Excellence in Education Award, California Chapter, 1994; Resident in Architecture, American Academy of Rome, 1996; and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.

Prior to his tenure at Berkeley, where he has been a member of the Department of City and Regional Planning since 1975, Jacobs served as Director of Planning for the City of San Francisco from 1967-1975. As Director, he developed a new comprehensive plan for the city, emphasizing public design guidelines for downtown development and the use of thoughtful design to revitalize neighborhoods throughout San Francisco. In addition to his work in San Francisco, Jacobs has served as a city planning and urban design consultant to cities throughout the world, including Curitiba, Brazil; Vancouver, British Columbia; Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon.