Death and Life of Great American Cities (Peregrine Books)

No cover

Jane Jacobs: Death and Life of Great American Cities (Peregrine Books) (1984, Viking Pr)

480 pages

English language

Published June 12, 1984 by Viking Pr.

ISBN:
978-0-14-055141-9
Copied ISBN!

View on OpenLibrary

5 stars (23 reviews)

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.

29 editions

Review of 'The death and life of great American cities' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

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 …

Review of 'The death and life of great American cities' on 'Goodreads'

4 stars

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 …

avatar for lucasrizoli

rated it

4 stars
avatar for jectoons

rated it

4 stars
avatar for jt196

rated it

5 stars
avatar for littlezen

rated it

4 stars
avatar for schmudde

rated it

5 stars
avatar for haagen_daz

rated it

4 stars
avatar for NC

rated it

5 stars
avatar for Faeton

rated it

5 stars
avatar for 5easypieces

rated it

4 stars
avatar for ngs

rated it

5 stars
avatar for vinibaggio

rated it

5 stars
avatar for javier

rated it

4 stars
avatar for thebbennett

rated it

5 stars
avatar for 4eyes

rated it

5 stars
avatar for kevbot9000

rated it

5 stars
avatar for flobin

rated it

5 stars
avatar for Murph

rated it

5 stars
avatar for anrk

rated it

4 stars