Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In this book, Jane Jacobs, building on the work of her debut, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, investigates the delicate way cities balance the interplay between the domestic production of goods and the ever-changing tide of imports. Using case studies of developing cities in the ancient, pre-agricultural world, and contemporary cities on the decline, like the financially irresponsible New York City of the mid-sixties, Jacobs identifies the main drivers of urban prosperity and growth, often via counterintuitive and revelatory lessons.

The Economy of Cities

Takes a close-up look at the patterns of dark ages throughout human history and applies these patterns to five key institutions of contemporary North American civilization to reveal why weaknesses in these institutions warn of a coming dark age.

Dark Age Ahead

"Learned, iconoclastic and exciting...Jacobs' diagnosis of the decay of cities in an increasingly integrated world economy is on the mark."—New York Times Book Review "Jacobs' book is inspired, idiosyncratic and personal...It is written with verve and humor; for a work of embattled theory, it is wonderfully concrete, and its leaps are breathtaking."—Los Angeles Times "Not only comprehensible but entertaining...Like Mrs. Jacobs' other books, it offers a concrete approach to an abstract and elusive subject. That, all by itself, makes for an intoxicating experience."—New York Times

Principles of Economic Life

Cities and the Wealth of Nations

A career-spanning selection of previously uncollected writings and talks by the legendary author and activist No one did more to change how we look at cities than Jane Jacobs, the visionary urbanist and economic thinker whose 1961 book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"started a global conversation that remains profoundly relevant more than half a century later. "Vital Little Plans" is an essential companion to "Death and Life" and Jacobs s other books on urbanism, economics, politics, and ethics. It offers readers a unique survey of her entire career in forty short pieces that have never been collected in a single volume, from charming and incisive urban vignettes from the 1930s to the raw materials of her two unfinished books of the 2000s, together with introductions and annotations by editors Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring. Readers will find classics here, including Jacobs s breakout article Downtown Is for People, as well as lesser-known gems like her speech at the inaugural Earth Day and a host of other rare or previously unavailable essays, articles, speeches, interviews, and lectures. Some pieces shed light on the development of her most famous insights, while others explore topics rarely dissected in her major works, from globalization to feminism to universal health care. With this book," " published in Jacobs s centenary year, contemporary readers whether well versed in her ideas or new to her writing are finally able to appreciate the full scope of her remarkable voice and vision. At a time when urban life is booming and people all over the world are moving to cities, the words of Jane Jacobs have never been more significant. "Vital Little Plans"weaves a lifetime of ideas from the most prominent urbanist of the twentieth century into a book that s indispensable to life in the twenty-first. Advance praise for "Vital Little Plans " Jane Jacobs saw the city like no other, and her observational genius, practical wisdom, and moral courage are on full display here, making this brilliantly curated book essential reading. With our cities facing unprecedented sustainability and affordability challenges, we need to listen to Jacobs more than ever. Matthew Desmond, "New York Times"bestselling author of"Evicted" In these stirring pages, Jane Jacobs shows herself once more to have been the keenest observer of the urban condition. Her vision of people-focused cities that are places, and not merely spaces, remains both prescient and relevant for planners, policy makers, and ordinary people today. Janette Sadik-Khan, Bloomberg Associates, former NYC transportation commissioner It s one thing to bring important ideas to the world, quite another to do it with such wit and subtlety. This volume reminds us what a crackling great writer Jane Jacobs was. James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Geography of Nowhere" This might be the very best of Jane Jacobs s books. The articles and speeches collected here are terrific summaries of her thoughts about the marvelous complexities of cities and how we might respond to city challenges to our best advantage. John Sewell, former mayor of Toronto "Vital Little Plans" is an immensely important retrospective of Jane Jacobs s articles and speeches. Her belief in the power of residents to make cities economically, environmentally, and socially successful shines through, as does her disdain for those who would build cities for cars, not people. David Miller, president and CEO of WWF-Canada and former mayor of Toronto"

The Short Works of Jane Jacobs

Vital Little Plans

The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, overextended government farm subsidies and zealous transit police, to show what happens when the moral systems of commerce collide with those of politics.

A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics

Systems of Survival

Łukasz Mojsak

Centrum Architektury (Warszawa).

Śmierć i życie wielkich miast Ameryki

From the revered author of the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities comes a new book that will revolutionize the way we think about the economy. Starting from the premise that human beings "exist wholly within nature as part of natural order in every respect," Jane Jacobs has focused her singular eye on the natural world in order to discover the fundamental models for a vibrant economy. The lessons she discloses come from fields as diverse as ecology, evolution, and cell biology. Written in the form of a Platonic dialogue among five fictional characters, The Nature of Economies is as astonishingly accessible and clear as it is irrepressibly brilliant and wise–a groundbreaking yet humane study destined to become another world-altering classic.

The Nature of Economies

The author of Cities and the Wealth of Nations looks at the connections between economics and nature and examines whether economic systems are shaped by the same forces at work in nature. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

Hailed by the The New York Times Book Review as 'perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning,' Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instantly recognised as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1961. In the decades that followed, Jacobs remained a brilliant and revered commentator on architecture, urban life, and economics until her death in 2006. These interviews capture Jacobs at her very best and are an essential reminder of why Jacobs was - and remains - unrivalled in her analyses.

The Last Interview and Other Conversations

Conventional city planning holds that cities decline because they are blighted by over-crowding, byt old buildings and narrow streets, and by mixtures of commercial and residential use. Crowded neighbourhoods, it is generally stated, breed apathy and crime, discourage investment and contaminate the areas around them. The response of city planners is to tear the old neighbourhoods down, scatter their inhabitants, lay out super-blocks, and rebuild the area according to an integrated plan, with the frequent result that the crime rate rises still higher, the new neighbourhood is more lifeless than the old one, and the surrounding areas deteriotate even more, until the whole city is affected. In this groundbreaking study, Jane Jacobs offers a real alternative to conventional city planning that we have had in this century. Herself a city dweller, she asks what makes cities work, why are some neighbourhoods full of things to do and see and others dul, why is the crime rate soaring in public housing developments, and why are some of the areas condemned as slums so much more safe, stable and congenial?

Michael Jacobs

The Story of Hannah Breece

A School Teacher in Old Alaska

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

A study of the historical separatist impulse advances the argument that geo-political units as we know them are contrived and fragile

Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty

The Question of Separatism

Vita e morte delle grandi città. Saggio sulle metropoli americane

The Death and Life of American Cities

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its initial publication, this special edition of Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, features a new Introduction by Jason Epstein, the book’s original editor, who provides an intimate perspective on Jacobs herself and unique insights into the creation and lasting influence of this classic. 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.

50th Anniversary Edition

Déclin et survie des grandes villes américaines

“Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority.” —The New York Sun Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning,” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instantly recognized as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1961. In the decades that followed, Jacobs remained a brilliant and revered commentator on architecture, urban life, and economics until her death in 2006. These interviews capture Jacobs at her very best and are an essential reminder of why Jacobs was—and remains—unrivaled in her analyses and her ability to cut through cant and received wisdom. From the Trade Paperback edition.

and Other Conversations

Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview

Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions. The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference -- from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario -- and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times.

Jane Jacobs

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