Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Andrew Reeves

Moments of profound insight and moments of endless doldrums.

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!

A close-up look at American urban history and design offers penetrating analyses of the functions and organization of city neighborhoods, the forces of deterioration and regeneration, and the necessary planning innovations. Reissue. 10,000 first printing.

Lindsay Cronk

I appreciate a scathing critique of zoning any day, and Jacobs's argument, that urban neighborhood communities essentially define and sustain a city, holds up more than a half a century after the book was published.

sky na

Jayme Cochrane

logan chung

Sam D

Alex K

Yuval Shoshan

Jane Mount

Misha

Patricia lee

Siddharth Ramakrishnan

Drew Spartz

Eva Decker

Patrick Toomey

Alex Spurrier

Ilja Panic

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed. Jane Jacob's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of cities.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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