ABSTRACT
In the urban built environment, access is a use of land: streets, sidewalks and driveways, for example. Within buildings, access is stairs, hallways and elevators. Storper and Venables (2006) say face-to-face contact overcomes key moral hazard and confidence problems and allows efficient selection and matching processes to occur: the nexus of the buzz that urban places should generate. Since 1930, the practical focus of professionals, civic organizations and government agencies that brought about the urban form we now have was controlling automobile movement. Combining urban design and planning, real estate development, traffic regulation, eminent domain and police power, these crews rewove the American urban fabric into patterns subtly and unexpectedly reshaping many dimensions of American life. American urban form has a character essential to American social and economic culture rooted in American Enlightenment thought about property and democracy. Jacobs (1961) saw the need to acknowledge the complexity of urban places, the deeper social-economic complexity beneath an apparent spatial-visual order.
