Seattle developer Bruce Blume, founder, chairman and CEO of The Blume Co., is spearheading a project inspired by the ideas of urban-planning critic and activist Jane Jacobs. Yale Campus, in Seattle's South Lake Union neighborhood, is a 776,000- square-foot office and retail project that includes landscaped plazas and walkways connecting the surrounding neighborhood. To bring the project to life, Blume is borrowing yet another concept, this time from the Netherlands: the woonerf.

Anyone who has been to Amsterdam has seen that pedestrians and bicyclists have it good there. The woonerf is a curbless street where people on two feet or two wheels have legal priority over cars, which are slowed by strategic placement of trees, planters, bollards and other obstacles.

The idea for the woonerf came from Kate Diamond, a principal of architectural firm NBBJ and a partner on Yale Campus. Blume embraced it, seeing it as a good way to "activate the street."

Jane Jacobs would have approved. The influence of Jacobs, who died in 2006, came by way of Blume's daughter, Rebecca, a student at Smith College who, after reading Jacobs' seminal work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, suggested her father read it, too. In the book, Jacobs argues for building places around people, not cars. Blume says it intelligently lays out the ingredients for building good places, chief among them population density, a proper mix of building uses, wide sidewalks and plenty of street life.

Yale Campus embodies these ideas by incorporating mixeduse buildings in a well-populated area, and by featuring plazas, walkways, landscaping, a natural, landscaped storm-water filtration system and, yes, woonerven. Construction is slated to begin in December.