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Loading... The Death and Life of Great American Citiesby Jane Jacobs
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Life-changing. Spirited, witty, incisive, perceptive -- anatomizes the cities around us and what makes them vibrant, or not. Full of examples from places you may well know. Has changed the way I understand the world around me. Seminal work in urban planning. A must read to better understand why our nation's cities and towns are the way they are. Highly recommended. I first read this in college (Dickinson) in 1963. It is one of the the few books I remember from back then, because it (and a marvellous professor) taught me how to think about and look at cities, or any large community. Jacobs took her position as a cranky antagonist seriously, and this book helped to educate a generation of planners, and just plain thinkers. I still can't look at the old Pan Am building, or whatever it's called now, and not see the destruction of vitality on Park Avenue. Well worth reading. 0.036 seconds to build listing no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 067974195X, Paperback)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 Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:05 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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I'll have to say there's a lot I learned from this book. Jacobs seems to have a knack for understanding how the sidewalks and a neighborhood work, kind from an anthropological perspective, but almost also from an engineering perspective. She can take things we take for granted apart and see how they tick. Jacobs also understands the factors that create diversity from which good cities draw their strength and vitality. These are, and none of them are optional:
1) mixed primary uses (such as commercial storefronts, residences, and landmarks organically mixed together.
2) small blocks (that break monotony, allow for greater commercial enterprise, and prevent isolation by allowing more people to circulate together)
3) aged buildings (again prevents the monotony of projects all built at once in the same style as well as being incubators for ventures that can afford their low rent.
4) concentration (that is a dense number of people living, working, shopping, and visiting an area with activity of some sort throughout the day. Density is a good thing for a neighborhood as opposed to overcrowding which is a very bad thing for a building).
Jacobs cites many examples of cities & neighborhoods that work due to the conditions above as well as how city planning theorists have contributed to the destruction of diversity and the decline of cities. Interestingly, parks - things that even I thought were good - are an example of bad city planning when they are constructed to be a virtue in themselves as opposed to part of a diverse city. Some of the worst slums in America have plentiful park space, but Jacobs explains that these parks create borders to neighborhoods and become vacuums that are underutilized and dangerous. On the other hand, Jacobs does not put much blame on the automobile, since the city planning theories she opposes arose at the same time as the automobile and she contends one did not influence the development of the other. There is a place for cars in cities, but a diverse neighborhood would cause a natural attrition of the great numbers of cars that damage a city and allow a more beneficial balance.
In the later chapters, Jacobs proposes many alternate tactics to how people who love cities can work to create diversity. These include subsidizing dwellings instead of projects, attrition of automobiles, visual order, and reorganizing city government to create leadership that works together within a district. I know of no examples in which Jacobs suggestions were tried, but they seem to be good ideas that would be worth trying even today. (