Overlapping Patterns

Reyner Banham, British architecture critic

The mix of different public and private areas in an urban setting interwoven together create a textile on a massive scale: the urban fabric. Jane Jacobs saw the fabric with new perspective, lost to the urban critics of her time. Like Reyner Banham on the west coast, Jacobs stopped wishing to change the city on a massive scale, shunning the ideas of urban revitalization that wiped out neighborhoods to put up neighborhoods. The city had grown into its own urban fabric and created an ecosystem that could be studied and understood. Banham argued, 'What's wrong with the sprawling city if it works?' Banham's idea gets fights back against the urban theory of his time, because he, like Jacobs, understood that people make a city work, not the architecture. People are at the center of the urbanism, not
buildings.