AMAZON/HARPER - Even 35 years after it was written, The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains the classic book on how cities work and how urban planners and others have naively destroyed functioning cities. It is widely known for its incisive treatment of those who would tear down functioning neighborhoods and destroy the lives and livelihoods of people for the sake of a groundless but intellectually appealing daydream.
But although many see it as a polemic against urban planning, the best parts of it, the parts that have endeared it to many who love cities, are quite different. Death and Life is, first of all, a work of observation. The illustrations are all around us, she says, and we must go and look. She shows us parts of the city that are alive -- the streets, she says, are the city that we see, and it is the streets and sidewalks that carry the most weight -- and find the patterns that help us not merely see but understand. She shows us the city as an ecology -- a system of interactions that is more than merely the laying out of buildings as if they were a child's wooden blocks.

But observation can mean simply the noting of objects. Ms. Jacobs writes beautifully, lovingly, of New York City and other urban places. Her piece "The Ballet of Hudson Street" is both an observation of events on the Greenwich Village street where she lived and a prose poem describing the comings and goings of the people, the rhythms of the shopkeepers and the commuters and others who use the street.

In this day when "inner city" is a synonym for poverty and hopelessness, it is important to be reminded that cities are literally the centers of civilization, of business, of culture. This is just as true today as it was in the early 1960s when this was written. We in North America owe Jane Jacobs a great debt for her insight and her eloquence.

Jane Jacobs is cited in an inordinate number of books I've read in the past few years (including Emergence by Steven Johnson) and I'm very interested in the way cities work, so it was natural for me to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In some ways, it is the book that seems to summarize many things that I've long felt about why cities are important, what makes them great, and how "city planning" gets it so wrong. It's amazing that this book was written almost 50 years ago describing the decay of cities that projects and city planning inflicted, not just because that things had already gone down hill at such an early date but that even with Jacobs' evocative warning, the ideas of city planning continue to be followed to this day!

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. ( )

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. ( )