The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. ... [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs's tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable. --- Book Description.… (more)

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LibraryThing member Othemts

Jane Jacobs is cited in an inordinate number of books I've read in the past few years (including Emergence by Steven Johnson) and I'm very interested in the way cities work, so it was natural for me to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In some ways, it is the book that seems

to summarize many things that I've long felt about why cities are important, what makes them great, and how "city planning" gets it so wrong. It's amazing that this book was written almost 50 years ago describing the decay of cities that projects and city planning inflicted, not just because that things had already gone down hill at such an early date but that even with Jacobs' evocative warning, the ideas of city planning continue to be followed to this day!

I'll have to say there's a lot I learned from this book. Jacobs seems to have a knack for understanding how the sidewalks and a neighborhood work, kind from an anthropological perspective, but almost also from an engineering perspective. She can take things we take for granted apart and see how they tick. Jacobs also understands the factors that create diversity from which good cities draw their strength and vitality. These are, and none of them are optional:
1) mixed primary uses (such as commercial storefronts, residences, and landmarks organically mixed together.
2) small blocks (that break monotony, allow for greater commercial enterprise, and prevent isolation by allowing more people to circulate together)
3) aged buildings (again prevents the monotony of projects all built at once in the same style as well as being incubators for ventures that can afford their low rent.
4) concentration (that is a dense number of people living, working, shopping, and visiting an area with activity of some sort throughout the day. Density is a good thing for a neighborhood as opposed to overcrowding which is a very bad thing for a building).

Jacobs cites many examples of cities & neighborhoods that work due to the conditions above as well as how city planning theorists have contributed to the destruction of diversity and the decline of cities. Interestingly, parks - things that even I thought were good - are an example of bad city planning when they are constructed to be a virtue in themselves as opposed to part of a diverse city. Some of the worst slums in America have plentiful park space, but Jacobs explains that these parks create borders to neighborhoods and become vacuums that are underutilized and dangerous. On the other hand, Jacobs does not put much blame on the automobile, since the city planning theories she opposes arose at the same time as the automobile and she contends one did not influence the development of the other. There is a place for cars in cities, but a diverse neighborhood would cause a natural attrition of the great numbers of cars that damage a city and allow a more beneficial balance.

In the later chapters, Jacobs proposes many alternate tactics to how people who love cities can work to create diversity. These include subsidizing dwellings instead of projects, attrition of automobiles, visual order, and reorganizing city government to create leadership that works together within a district. I know of no examples in which Jacobs suggestions were tried, but they seem to be good ideas that would be worth trying even today.

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LibraryThing member ty1997

In the early 1960s, as American cities continued their decline into blight, as the suburbs ballooned, and as city planners tried urban renewal methods such as building massive projects and installing huge expressways, one community activist (or perhaps "active community member" would be more apt

since activities implies troublemaker and active community members should be viewed as no such thing) believed that these planners, and planning in general, were going about it all wrong. Her name was Jane Jacobs and she decided to put pen to paper, and oh did she ever:

"This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines. My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or a hair-splitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning and rebuilding."

That, my friends, is the first paragraph of the book. If you're not already in love with a woman, who had no formal training in urban planning other than what she knew from her own thorough observations, would throw a grenade into the doubtlessly male-dominated world of 1961 urban planning, then I will never be able to make you love Jane Jacobs. But I will at least try to make you interested in her seminal work.

Jacobs views large American cities as unique from the (then even more common) small town life in America. In her view, there were few secrets in small towns because everyone know someone or at least knew someone who knew you, and this knowledge helped to keep actions in the community in check. In contrast, cities are made up of strangers. Lots of strangers. So a different system is needed to drive a safe and economically vibrant community. In Jacob's view, the main driver for both safety and vitality in neighborhoods was streets with lots of foot traffic, at all hours not just certain hours, and lots of eyes (such as stay-at-home parents and business owners) watching them (in the natural course of their days, parents watching children playing, etc). Jacobs envisioned four components, all of which were required, to make a neighborhood thrive:

1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function, preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.
2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.
3. The district must mingle building that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.

Jacobs divides the book into four sections, laying first the groundwork regarding how cities operate so that in the second part she can describe in detail each of her four criteria. The remaining parts of the book go into further detail about implementation, with more than one reference to Robert Moses (Jacobs is at least partly responsible for stopping his plan to raze parts of her neighborhood, Greenwich Village, and others such as Soho and Little Italy in order to build a twelve-lane Lower Manhattan Expressway. Moses is profiled in the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro which has been on my long list of books to read and is now due to be upgraded to my short list).

Jacobs knew cities. She watched cities. She loved cities. And she clearly didn't shy away from fighting for what she knew. This book can be viewed as her manifesto on cities and had become a classic for the field. It is highly recommended.

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LibraryThing member rakerman

Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a wonderfully written work of classical science. By this I mean she draws her conclusions based on direct observation, as free from preconceptions as possible. This is absolutely essential for a work analyzing people's cultural

interactions as it is first descriptive and then prescriptive. All too often, when dealing with people, we cannot resist utopian urges to prescribe how they should behave, rather than accepting and working with the reality of human interaction in all its richness and complexity.

She starts with the most basic element of a city: the sidewalk. What makes a particular area interesting and comfortable for people to be in? Her fundamental concept, difficult to grasp with traditional rigid methods of planning and analysis, is that cities thrive on diversity of people, of buildings, of activities... that the whole engine of a great city is a diverse and interesting street life, full of people circulating around. In clear and compelling descriptions she lays out the characteristics of districts that "work", and compares their success with the failed areas of cities. Time and again, she finds the failed areas are victims of misguided planning, of utopian schemes about vast collections of imposing buildings or projects set within parkland.

This reminded me of Toronto's Olympic bid, and of how I think they are fortunate to lose. Grand schemes like that always end in unusable spaces. The Simpson's mocked this in the episode where they visited the empty wasteland of the former St. Louis World's Fair, a bare plaza with scraps of paper blowing across its stark expanse. Just recently in the paper there was an article about the areas built for the Sydney Olympics, now standing empty and underused.

It's a mark of her careful approach to analyzing the life of cities that she doesn't get around to looking at that great bugaboo, the car, until her 18th chapter. So many people, myself included, rail against the destruction of cities by cars, but she argues that this is just symptomatic of bad planning in general. Importantly, she argues for a slow and gradual discouragement of car traffic, rather than some grand plan to instantly turn the downtown into a pedestrian area. Again and again she returns to the slowly, "organically" evolving reality of working cities, rather than the lofty architectural abstractions favoured by planners, or the immediate urgencies of roads and parking as seen by highwaymen.

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LibraryThing member snash

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was an excellent clearly presented analysis of what makes cities work and what doesn't along with practical suggestions to help problem neighborhoods. I don't keep abreast of what is presently being done in city planning but I get the impression that not

enough has changed since it was written 50 years ago.

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LibraryThing member Andromeda_Yelton

Life-changing. Spirited, witty, incisive, perceptive -- anatomizes the cities around us and what makes them vibrant, or not. Full of examples from places you may well know. Has changed the way I understand the world around me.

LibraryThing member uqbar

Absolutely fascinating and prescient. In one section on the importance of connectivity to city life, Jacobs discusses what she calls 'hop-skip' networks, recognizable in today's terminology as the 'small-world networks' whose analysis has been a hot topic in the math community in the past few years

-- this in a book published in 1961! I appreciated that her examples were sometimes grounded in Pittsburgh and San Francisco, since I've spent some time in those cities, albeit 40 years later. Having absorbed this book's lesson about the importance of local understanding and bottom-up thinking for city planning, I muse about a 'data-driven' approach to city planning, in which massive amounts of data collected across multiple cities and analyzed using machine learning techniques might allow one to play SimCity with real cities -- with some hope that the start condition of a city and the planner predictions will match the actual outcomes on the axes that matter. This could allow us to largely discard a priori theories of planning in favor of a 'watch-what-works' approach, following Jacobs' ideas.

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LibraryThing member danielmacy

An important work for those who care about their urban environment. Shortly after her death in 2006, Jacobs' wisdom was challenged as outmoded, and the rise of fake "town centers" have been attributed to her "new urbanism". However, many of her principles are important to consider, even as they

were inevitably misapplied by some who undoubtedly had the best of intentions.

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LibraryThing member heavywinter

Seminal work in urban planning. A must read to better understand why our nation's cities and towns are the way they are. Highly recommended.

LibraryThing member edella

AMAZON/HARPER - Even 35 years after it was written, The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains the classic book on how cities work and how urban planners and others have naively destroyed functioning cities. It is widely known for its incisive treatment of those who would tear down

functioning neighborhoods and destroy the lives and livelihoods of people for the sake of a groundless but intellectually appealing daydream.
But although many see it as a polemic against urban planning, the best parts of it, the parts that have endeared it to many who love cities, are quite different. Death and Life is, first of all, a work of observation. The illustrations are all around us, she says, and we must go and look. She shows us parts of the city that are alive -- the streets, she says, are the city that we see, and it is the streets and sidewalks that carry the most weight -- and find the patterns that help us not merely see but understand. She shows us the city as an ecology -- a system of interactions that is more than merely the laying out of buildings as if they were a child's wooden blocks.

But observation can mean simply the noting of objects. Ms. Jacobs writes beautifully, lovingly, of New York City and other urban places. Her piece "The Ballet of Hudson Street" is both an observation of events on the Greenwich Village street where she lived and a prose poem describing the comings and goings of the people, the rhythms of the shopkeepers and the commuters and others who use the street.

In this day when "inner city" is a synonym for poverty and hopelessness, it is important to be reminded that cities are literally the centers of civilization, of business, of culture. This is just as true today as it was in the early 1960s when this was written. We in North America owe Jane Jacobs a great debt for her insight and her eloquence.

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LibraryThing member richardhobbs

Of some interest to politically inclined

LibraryThing member Maya47Bob46

One of the great books about city planning. It got me interested in housing and community development when I first read it in the 1980's. I have been know to quote Jacobs when I am blogging about development.

LibraryThing member nhcoffin

This is one of those books every city dweller SHOULD read.

LibraryThing member rachelv

Anyone at all interested in cities and urbanism should read this book. It's fantastic. A surprisingly easy read considering how packed with information it is.

LibraryThing member AlexEpstein

Written in 1961, this awesome book pretty much explains why the big city projects of the 50's and 60's didn't work, why tearing down grand old buildings and decaying low-density neighborhoods can be equally bad, and how cities work. It sort of predicts how cities have bounced back in the 50 years

since Jane Jacobs wrote the book.

Jane Jacobs was responsible, among other things, for preventing New York City from ramming a freeway through Greenwich Village. Thank you, Jane.

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LibraryThing member gypsysmom

It took me a long time to read this book but at no time did I feel like stopping. It's just that I had to take my time to digest all the important messages Jacobs gave in the book and then think about how they applied today.

In 1961 when Jacobs wrote this book she was living in Greenwich Village in

New York City and most of what she decided about cities was learned in her own neighbourhood. She was obviously a keen observer and, just as importantly, a good listener. She saw what worked in neighbourhoods and districts and cities. Her philosophy for good working neighbourhoods centres on diversity. At page 144 she writes "A mixture of uses, if it is to be sufficiently complex to sustain city safety, public contact, and cross-use, needs an enormous diversity of ingredients. So the first question--and I think by far the most important question--is this: How can cities generate enough mixture among uses--enough diversity--throughout enough of their territories to sustain their own civilization?" She goes on to prescribe four conditions for diversity:
1. The district, and its internal parts, must serve more than one primary function and preferably more than two.
2. Most blocks must be short.
3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition.
4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people for whatever purpose they may be there.

Sounds pretty simple but this was the first time anyone had ever put these four conditions together. And, I would say, more than 50 years later city planners still haven't learned the lessons of this book. I am hopeful that Winnipeg's downtown is finally coming into a status that combines these 4 conditions since there are far more residential uses than even 10 years ago. Also the addition of the MTS Centre in the heart of downtown brings people into the heart of the city at night and on weekends.

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LibraryThing member mrgan

I'm in agreement with everything so far and I'm sure the rest of the book is fine, but it's rather drawn out and, in another reviewer's phrase, "easy to put down".

LibraryThing member Andjhostet

Deserving of its reputation as one of the most important books ever written in the field of American City Planning. It is a fascinating book, and I will never look at cities the same after reading it.

Jane Jacobs does a remarkable job of breaking down an incredible complex topic, making easily

digestible, providing examples of good and bad, and building off of the idea in order to introduce her next idea.

She is not a planner, or engineer, or academic. Just a concerned citizen, who has a really good eye for understanding the complex processes of cities, and how they function. She also has a pretty compelling way with words, I really enjoyed some of her prose at times, and her extended metaphors could really have a lot of teeth.

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