458 pages
English language
Published July 12, 2002 by Random House.
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.
Rated this well because I think it's got something important to say given the time it was written, but I can't say I enjoyed reading it.
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 …
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.
To be perfectly honest, I had a hard time getting through this book. It's at times quite dense with highly specialized language and at other times, repetitive and dry. But I loved how concerted and passionate the arguments were in tone, and how detailed and studious they were in content.
Everything caught me by surprise. The arguments I thought would be there, about parks and neighborhoods and walkability and cars, were mostly turned on their heads, ensuring at every turn that the reader was anchored in discussion of these matters to the principle criteria making up "city diversity," or a tight-knit, interdependent mixture of uses. This book is worth making it through for the study in nuance alone. It will make you rethink what's good and bad about the parts of cities you like and dislike.
My least favorite part was Jacobs' tendency to something like New York exceptionalism. It's …
To be perfectly honest, I had a hard time getting through this book. It's at times quite dense with highly specialized language and at other times, repetitive and dry. But I loved how concerted and passionate the arguments were in tone, and how detailed and studious they were in content.
Everything caught me by surprise. The arguments I thought would be there, about parks and neighborhoods and walkability and cars, were mostly turned on their heads, ensuring at every turn that the reader was anchored in discussion of these matters to the principle criteria making up "city diversity," or a tight-knit, interdependent mixture of uses. This book is worth making it through for the study in nuance alone. It will make you rethink what's good and bad about the parts of cities you like and dislike.
My least favorite part was Jacobs' tendency to something like New York exceptionalism. It's no issue that she wrote primarily about the city and neighborhood she knew and lived; the problem was that when she did have things to say about other cities, they were mostly negative. Few places other than the West Village of New York seemed to provide her with functional models to study.
My most favorite part was the last chapter, in which she quotes extensively from Warren Weaver's "Science and Complexity" and discusses how cities might be considered such, as well as schools of thought we need for reasoning about it. If you can't make it through the entirety of this book, I highly recommend at least reading this one chapter.
