The Bunker

The time at which a city locality starts to act like an "idiot" cell is not hard to discover. Anyone intimate with an outstanding successful city district knows when this qualitative turn is in the process of occuring. Those who use the facilities that are starting to disappear, or veiw them with pleasure, know full well when the diversity and interest of a locality to which they are attached are on the downgrade. They know full well when segments of the population are being crowded out, and diversity of population is narrowing - especially if they are being crowded out themselves. They even know many of these results in advance of their fulfillment, by projecting proposed or imminent physical changes into changes in everyday life and the everyday scene. The people in a district talk about it, they register both the fact and effect of diversity's self-destruction long before slowpoke maps and statistics tell, too late, the misfortune of what happened. Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities