Rating: 
Summary: Jane Jacobs = GR8
Review: "It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably much else in our society."This is a book about understanding cities and understanding scientifically what makes them thrive and sustain themselves. It also delves into the history of the forces that made them what they are, and the methods that will need to be brought to bear if we intend to create life again in our downtowns. Jacobs really lays it down, giving us a comprehensive look at how great cities work. I'd recommend this book to students of city planning, Architecture, and anybody who is interested in developing an understanding of why things are the way they are.
Rating:
Summary: Why to Read This Book
Review: 1. It's accessable. It's an easy read. Forget the cliff notes version or some secondary source -- totally unnecessary. 2. It contains counter intutitive insights. Rare in social commentary. 3. Sub themes resonate. Unintended consequences of superficially progressive/reformist agendas. Appeals to the latent libertarian sensibility. 4. Balance between what works (LIFE) and what doesn't (Death). Contrast with the numerous books whose main theme is how the automobile ruined America. Get the nicely bound Modern Library version. It's relatively cheap and feels good. I'll end with a question. Why did she move to Toronto?
Rating:
Summary: Better than Smarth Growth
Review: A stunning and essential book, but the reviewer who describes New Urbanism and Smart Growth as Jane Jacobs repackaged insults her. Her comments are much more finely qualified. For example: "I hope that no reader will try to transfer my observations into guides as to what goes on in towns, or little cities, or in suburbs which are still suburban. Towns, suburbs and even little cities are completely different organisms from great cities." It would be more accurate to call Smart Growth an attempt to apply Jacobs' ideas to the places to which she warned they shouldn't be applied.
Rating:
Summary: Complexity, chaos theory and fractals... alive in cities
Review: Alright, she doesn't actually use the "chaos theory" and "fractal" words. At the end of this fascinating book, however, is a tie-in to what we are only beginning to harness in the world of problem-solving. Jane Jacobs hints at her understanding of complexity throughout the book, but her basis is made clear in the last chapter as she exposes the way to grasp the problems of cities. The reason her book has outlasted her critics is that she applied rational observation and empiricism to a realm that was dominated by artists trying to build pretty things. While styles of art may change quickly, she has demonstrated that human behaviour and needs are a bit more timeless.
Rating:
Summary: A debate on every page
Review: An opinionated exploration of great cities. I might have disagreed with the author almost as often as I agreed with her, but her opinions are lucid and compelling. Highly recommended and a pleasure to read.
Rating:
Summary: New tools for looking at the world.
Review: At the end of this book Jacobs refers to a seminal work in the evolving science of organized complexity. Yet her method of studying cities- what makes them work successfully and what causes them to fail - reminds me more of some of the 16th/17th century physical scientists such as Galileo. Like them, she looked at her world free of the misconceptions and implicit assumptions of the "authorities", the city planners who used deduction from false premises rather than induction from detailed observation. Jacobs is a fantastic observer. Like the early scientists she is then able to generalize, always mindful of the limitations of her generalizations, and like the earlier scientists (cf. Galileo and ship building) she is interested in practical technology (in her case practical policy). While copyrighted in 1961, this book is all too relevant today: while some of its ideas are mainstream, we are still making many of the same errors. She draws her observations from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco and for the reader familiar with those cities, especially the first three, there is an added dimension. I give this book 5 stars, because it provided me with new intellectual tools for analyzing the world, and it is fun applying them. At the same time, I will say that it is longer than it needs to be. Internalizing a concept, even one that may sound like common sense once it is enunciated, benefits from a certain amount of repetition and many examples, but there is too much repetition here.
Rating:
Summary: New tools for looking at the world.
Review: At the end of this book Jacobs refers to a seminal work in the evolving science of organized complexity. Yet her method of studying cities- what makes them work successfully and what causes them to fail - reminds me more of some of the 16th/17th century physical scientists such as Galileo. Like them, she looked at her world free of the misconceptions and implicit assumptions of the "authorities", the city planners who used deduction from false premises rather than induction from detailed observation. Jacobs is a fantastic observer. Like the early scientists she is then able to generalize, always mindful of the limitations of her generalizations, and like the earlier scientists (cf. Galileo and ship building) she is interested in practical technology (in her case practical policy). While copyrighted in 1961, this book is all too relevant today: while some of its ideas are mainstream, we are still making many of the same errors. She draws her observations from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco and for the reader familiar with those cities, especially the first three, there is an added dimension. I give this book 5 stars, because it provided me with new intellectual tools for analyzing the world, and it is fun applying them. At the same time, I will say that it is longer than it needs to be. Internalizing a concept, even one that may sound like common sense once it is enunciated, benefits from a certain amount of repetition and many examples, but there is too much repetition here.
Rating:
Summary: How street interactions create lively neighbourhoods
Review: Death and Life is a book about how and why cities work. Written in 1961, this astonishing classic is just as pertinent today as when it was written. Steve Johnson's argues in "Emergence" that Jacobs was years ahead of her time in analysing city suburbs in terms of the emergent behaviour of micro-interactions at the street level. It is how the users of a neighbourhood are permitted to interact by the street that dictate what kind of neighbourhood results. The genesis of this book arose in part to Jacobs' own experience in preventing the razing of Greenwich Village, New York, into a series of housing projects. This kind of bottom-up thinking is complete anathema to city planners trained in top-down thinking. Indeed, Jacobs sharpens the knives for her one-time mentor Lewis Mumford and his idea of the Garden City, the intellectual model behind the hideous surburban sprawl of cities like Los Angeles and the crippling failures of low-income housing projects. Why have lively city neighbourings in the first place? In short, people like other people, lots of them and in as many different varieties as possible. Don't be fooled by the engagingly informal prose, inside this book are immensely sophisticated pieces of sociological reasoning, eg the integral importance of strangers in neighbourhoods, the nature of safety on lively public streets, the function of privacy in cities as oposed to towns. The book explains how lively city neighbourhoods are the engines of a city's economy, how slums are formed and more importantly, how slums can un-slum themselves. Jacobs argues that through this process of un-slumming "cities grow the middle class". If Jacobs is correct then neglecting the nurtue of lively city neighbourhoods is one of the greatest obstacles to eradicating poverty in our cities today. After a thorough analysis of the life of cities using a plethora of concrete examples, four simple rules of thumb are given to liven city neighbourhoods - short city blocks, mixed pattern of usage, high density of people and lots of old buildings. Mystified? Well then, read the book and find out why for yourself. Then these rules will just seem like plain common-sense.
Rating:
Summary: The classic exposition of how cities work. A must-read.
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: The classic exposition of how cities work. A must-read.
Review: Even 35 years after it was written, The Death and Life of Great AmericanCities 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.
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