Brooklyn Brainery

In honor of our recent class on Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, I thought I'd write up a quick note on my favorite urban planning rule of thumb: the four-story limit, an idea popularized in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. 

Simply, it's the idea that buildings in a residential neighborhood are best kept to four stories or lower, with anything taller taking "people away from the ground, and away from the casual, every-day society that occurs on the sidewalks and streets." It's a lovely idea, and, for me at least, it's the reason it feels more humane to live in Brooklyn than Midtown.  

If this sounds familiar, it's a nice complement to Jane Jacobs' idea in The Death and Life of Great American Cities about "eyes on the street" leading to increased street safety in neighborhoods. The farther up you get, the harder it is to keep an eye on what's going on below. 

I've even got a real life example for you! We've had a couple of our big windows broken at the Brainery, one of them just last night. Both times we were alerted by an upstairs neighbor as soon as they noticed. It's hard to say whether we'd know anyone who lived above us if we were on the ground floor of 20-story building rather than a small one, but I sorta doubt it. 

(quote from A Pattern Language, pg 21)