Name: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Rating: 4.048780487804878 (41 reviews)
ISBN: 0375508732

Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

charisa

i am proud of myself for finishing this because it was incredibly chunky AND dry lmao. like, i-just-dyed-my-hair-seven-consecutive-times kind of dry. at the same time, i recognize why this is a seminal text in the field of urban design/planning. jacobs is visionary and passionate, offering solutions to large-scale metropolitan issues and lambasting orthodox urbanism with a striking sense of conviction. lots of geopolitical discourse, critiques of top-down social engineering, and praise of sidewalks. even with the 1961 publication date, her commentary (mostly) remains relevant, especially in its ethnographic applications.

an aside: i picked this up during one of my latest career crises where i considered running away to grad school and pivoting into urban design. still enthralled by walkable cities, but also maybe i will give this plan more than a minute's consideration hmm...

Matthew Royal

Jacobs asserts that effective self-government requires community continuity. Social ties developed over time can fracture in an instant when city planners "revitalize" a neighborhood, preserving its buildings, but gutting the connections that make a city alive. Intentional or not, this atomizing of social connections destroys The People's ability to effectively resist tyrannical city policies and leaders.


Political action is needed and enormous effort to bring together coordination of multiple departments, and individual experts don't know what they don't know about specific neighbors in the city. Communication and coordination among stovepiped government agencies and departments and committees is done through a patchwork of communication channels and liaisons and informal back channels. 


Fragmented administration, fragmented and overlapping authority is perceived as being hypocritical or not caring, but it's the structure of administration itself. Planning Commissions are supposed to be the solution to complexity and coordination breakdown, but they're still very vertical and understand the city only at a very high level. Proposals have to be made to them. Timing is an issue when engaging neighborhoods, and because communication didn't get to all the stakeholders.


Jacobs looks to techniques used in the sciences to manage this complexity, rather than treat every problem like a 19th century 2-variable problem, like the ratio of residential units to greenspace.


Overall, I love her identification of the problem and solution for her local issues in New York City. Her recognition that “City Planning is all bustle and no progress” rings true, and it’s exciting to read her diagnosis of the issue. Systemically, Jacobs doesn’t offer specifics on how to solve the problem for everyone, but I think through progressively solving more “local” coordination problems and working toward increasing economic and “use” diversity in cities, we’ll converge to a solution that uses the best mathematical and scientific techniques available.

Safiya 

I was supposed to read this a few years earlier but never got my hands on it.

Now that I have read it, I'm happy because I didn't miss much, most of the lessons in urban planning lessons were ingrained in my head for a while now : almost intuitively as one grows in a North African context where all of this is not something from the past or a fantasy rather alive medinas with real people inside of them ...

This book could serve as a great manifesto for community organizations as regards advocating better housing policy arrangements...

It is a long qualitative analysis of social practices in big cities (urban context generally) and has a good deal of interviews that were interwoven in the author's rationale.
The author goes back to the basic functions of a city, a little bit contrasting with the CIAM s Athens charter: it's an anthropocentric approach to urban planning. (not your average car-centered Cité Radieuse ! Sorry Corbu) 

Worth the wait and the read!

Thirty years after its publication, 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, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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