This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 4th, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

Jane Jacobs believed that cities should be human scale. Her book, The Death and Life of

Great American Cities delivered a dynamic bottom-up vision for how cities can thrive.

For today what would have been Jane Jacobs 100th birthday, I speak with Emily Washington, a blogger at market urbanism.com and a policy research manager at the Mercatus Center.

As we mark, Jane Jacob's 100th birthday, I spoke with a gentleman a while back who wrote about zoning and viewed Jane

Jacobs as his something like an intellectual goddess to him that she had written so powerfully and carefully

about issues relating to cities and how they thrive.

And the only thing of hers that I ever read or paid any attention to was in an urban economics

class I read, death and life of great American cities.

So if you would mind, detail what is the big thrust of that book?

Sure, that's certainly her most famous book that's been an inspiration to people

across the political spectrum and certainly very influential within the

urban planning field. In the book, her key insight is that walkable

neighborhoods have four key drivers of diversity.

They have a mix of uses, so both residential as well as commercial and office development.

They have small blocks that she calls a human scale so people can easily see where they're headed and have a

perspective of how far they have to walk between destinations. They have a diverse

age of buildings which results in diverse rental rates so that startups can afford to thrive in

neighborhoods with more established businesses and lastly they have a high

density of both people and buildings.

I hear that word density and I think of the sort of the modern urban planners desire for greater density.

But of course density brings its own problems with it today, but I guess more broadly,

...