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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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"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.
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.
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.
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.
Jane Jacobs was responsible, among other things, for preventing New York City from ramming a freeway through Greenwich Village. Thank you, Jane.
In 1961 when Jacobs wrote this book she was living in Greenwich Village in
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.
Jane Jacobs does a remarkable job of breaking down an incredible complex topic, making easily
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.
Jacobs’s ideal neighbourhood, where kids play in the street under the watchful eyes of neighbours and local tradespeople and there is a constant coming and going on foot between homes, shops, workplaces, schools, bars and restaurants, is probably rather unrealistic sixty years on, and of course it was only ever meant to apply to inner-city areas — as far as she is concerned, the suburbs are a lost cause anyway. But the arguments she makes against single-use zoning and against inflexible large-scale projects embodying someone’s paternalistic vision of how (other) people should live remain very valid. And there’s a lot of detailed and mostly sensible-sounding advice in the book about things like street layout, rent subsidies, lending policies, how to lay out parks, and much more.