[anamax]

By those rules, Silicon Valley is not a "flourishing city area".

Let me guess - Ms Jacobs wants to "encourage" those factors by various means.

What would the Portugese rather have, a "flourishing city area" or a job and technology producing area?

In other news, black families are leaving "flourishing cities" http://articles.sfgate.com/2008-08-10/bay-area/17121007_1_af... . See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black%20flight .

In that, black families are like other families - http://www.sfexaminer.com/local/2011/03/san-francisco-becomi... .

Some people prefer urban. However, a lot of people don't. The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals.

[greencircle]

Silicon Valley isn't a city. San Francisco is. I don't know whether Jacobs wanted to encourage such factors --- she turned city planning on its head with her book in 1960, and it was a data-driven book, while the orthodoxy at the time satisfied "The urbanists are merely one group who hasn't figured out that when an argument suggests/implies behavior that doesn't happen, the argument is wrong, no matter how appealing the proponents find the conclusion or proposals."

[AndrewO]

I'm not sure why "encourage" is in quotes. If you mean, "inspire the next generation of city planners and architects to design places that people want to actually live" you're right. But I'm reading a more dismissive tone and I'm not sure why.

Jacobs' work directly contributed to the decline of the urban superblock (that mainstay of 1960s urbanism and blight on 21st century cities) and a rebirth of the mixed use development. The later is especially popular in inner suburbs going through phases of new growth looking for an antidote to their original strip-mall and subdevelopment plans (usually lack of plans).