Jane Jacobs Knows Web 2.0

What I think is most interesting about Web 2.0 isn't so much the AJAX-y, interface stuff (though that's interesting too) but the much, much larger cultural shift taking place as web tools have allowed the web to become more participatory. The social web. And the struggle those of us engaged in 'web design' are currently going through as we try to shift our thinking from "I design a lovely, usable web site, and you will come, complete your tasks, and go away happy" to the far messier, more complex system in which we are challeneged to facilitate experiences, but admit that we cannot control them. It's a huge shift, and many of us are at a bit of a loss as to how we fit in.

It all reminds me of my friend Jane Jacobs. I don't actually know Jane. If you're not familiar, she's he author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, among other things. Basically, Jnae invented the way of thinking about cities and how they function that has become today's new urbanism.

Here's an example: "Eyes on the street." Jacobs recognized that isolating people (in this case, she argued specifically against the Robert Moses style towers for housing low income people) away from the activity taking place at street level created a environment which encouraged crime. Low building, porches, stoops, windows with balconies, a mix of commerical and residential spaces--all of these allow people to see what's going on at street leve, and crime is deterred.

Robert Moses, on the other hand, took a much different approach. Moses wasn't too interested in how his projects affected people. He loved 'moderness' -- efficiency and order. He wanted wide rivers of asphalt carrying people speedily to their destinations. He wanted poor people neatly organized into their giant boxes and then forgotten. He didn't want to encourage people to interact. He wanted to control people with his grand design vision.

Today of course, much of what Moses designed is considered a failure. His housing projects and
the cross bronx expressway, in particular, generally serve as examples of how to destroy communities and encourage crime. And remind me of exactly the kind of online design many of us are accustomed to creating.

Jane Jacobs = Web 2.0, MySpace, flickr, and the messy, ugly, undesigned, seemingly disorganized mass of human conversation and expression that makes many of us trained in consistency cringe
Robert Moses = Web 1.0, Nielsen, efficiency trumps all, and 'I know better than you' control.

Now I just wish someone would write the book which explains all the subtle ways to harness good online, just like Jane did for cities. Any takers?