The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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Summary: Still relevant after all these years
Review: Jane Jacobs's writing style is straightfoward, confident and evocative of a certain time period--the middle of the twentieth century, when postwar modernization was occurring at a quicker pace than ever before. Her writing at times is almost like that of a novel, her descriptions of busy city streets nuanced and fleshed-out. You can easily envision old New York City while reading about the social ballet that occurs in Greenwich Village and Central Park.
While the book was written 40 years ago, it is no less relevant to the problems of American cities today. The ideas put forth by the author in this seminal work were groundbreaking at the time, and while they seem almost common sense to me, they have, for the most part, been largely ignored (in the sense that few tangible results have spawned) and unimplemented. The fact that this is the case makes one realize how *slow* in certain respects our culture is to change and how closed off to new, innovative ideas we can be.
Jacobs does not only point out flaws of commonly held "truths" about city planning, but also successfully argues that many of the tenets of city planning have deep roots in classism/racism and xenophobia. The entire fourth section of the book details the author's suggestions for improving the structure of cities. The only complaint I have is that the subject matter can be a bit dry (such as when discussing housing subsidies), but this is a matter of course and is minimized by the overall importance and originality of the book.

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Summary: A Classic in the study of cities
Review: One of the most insightful and thought provoking books I have ever read. Jane Jacobs' classic work on the functioning of cities, though published in 1961, offers a fresh look at our cities and how we choose to live.

Ms. Jacobs' insights grow out of two factors which combine make this an outstanding book. First, she approaches cities as living beings. True, cities are made of bricks and mortar but over time buildings, streets and neighborhoods change in response to the people who live and work in them. Secondly, she bases her conclusions on empirical experience. The author doesn't sit in some ivory tower, theorize how people should live and then expect people's actions to fit those theories. Rather, she observes daily life and from there draws her conclusions.

One item that hit closest to home for me was the book's examination of the effects of public housing. Growing up and living in the Chicago area I knew firsthand that the "projects" were not a desirable place to live. Built at the same time that The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes were promoted as an improvement to the community. Complete with large parcels of land allocated for parks and bulldozing what were considered "slums" the view at the time was that these projects would improve the vitality of the neighborhood. But, as Ms. Jacobs rightly observed back in 1961, instead of promoting community, projects such as these only set the scene for isolation and fear.

Time has proven this work to be a classic. Many of her observations went against the prevailing wisdom of the era when the book was published. But now, at the dawn of the 21st century, the Robert Taylor Homes face the wrecking ball and cities everywhere are heeding the wisdom in this book as they rethink their approaches toward urban development.

Rating:
Summary: Makes understanding how cities work easy
Review: The book is written in simple enough language and concepts that you only have to live in a large city to understand what she is saying. Her concepts are easy to understand, but also make perfect sense. The best part of this book is applying what you read to your own city. I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.

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Summary: A Must-have!!
Review: The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a genius book. Words cannot explain how powerful and convincing this book is, you have to buy it yourself to understand. Even at her elder age, Jacobs is still very involved in urban issues in the City of Toronto where she now resides, but even half way around the world people have been affected by her stance on issues surrounding cities, as many municipal politicians use The Death and Life... as their policy bible.

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Summary: Anything But a Classic
Review: The first time I read Jane Jacobs opus to the city street, I was bowled over by what seemed to be just plain "common sense." However, a second reading had much less impact. Having since read Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford and many other of the architects and critics whom she panned, I realized just how weak an analysis she provided. Jane provided a most cursory review of past urban planning ideas, undeseveredly raking Lewis Mumford over the coals when he too protested against many of the redevelopment projects slated for New York in the 1950's. In fact, what Jacobs does is go back to the early Modern planning ideas from the 1920's and 30's and leads readers to assume that the leading lights had not changed their views one iota since then. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sure, European Modernism took root in America after WWII with Walter Gropius heading the Harvard School of Design and Mies van der Rohe doing his signature works in Chicago and New York, but what happened to American cities in the 1950's was thoroughly American, and had roots going back to the 19th century industrial revolution. American cities were constantly being remade, very much like the image of America itself. The mid-rise and hi-rise housing complexes first put forward in the 20's were being seriously questioned by the architectural community in the 50's, but developers saw these buildings as expedient and profitable solutions to the ever-increasing demand for housing. The federal and city governments supported these projects in the war on poverty. Yet, it was poverty that saved many of the neighborhoods which Jacobs described, along with community action groups which fought against the razing of their neighborhoods in the name of progress.

What Jane Jacobs has done is simply collect a set of anecdotes and provide a "from the hip" commentary on Modern planning solutions, without any serious research into the subject. If she had taken a closer look, she would have seen how Le Corbusier's own ideas evolved greatly since he first extolled the industrial city, and how architects and planners, influenced by Le Corbusier's recent directions, were already calling for a more human scale in urban development. But, Ms. Jacobs wanted to shock the public and did so by pointing out the worst in Modernism, and holding up a handful of New York and Chicago neighborhoods as the models for sympathetic development. The book is badly dated with much finer work on the subject available through this bookstore.

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Summary: Interesting political analysis
Review: The reviewer from New Hampshire blames big government for the decline of city neighborhoods [through urban renewal], yet in so many contemporary American cities the free market forces have taken entire districts [lower Manhattan being a classic case in point] and turned them into office tower farms, which are just as empty after dark as the urban renewal neighborhoods he despises.

Regardless, Jacobs' book is a great, non-partisan look at what makes American cities tick; it is indeed a must-read for city dwellers who want to stay involved in their own political processes and keep the cities they inhabit worth living in.

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Summary: a vision that's finally winning
Review: The significance of Jane Jacobs's book is really twofold. One reason is specific; it offers a devastating critique of urban planning. The other is more general; it lies in the degree to which this amateur's analysis calls into question the very concepts of bureaucratic expertise and centralized planning. On cities specifically, Jacobs was an early and prescient voice warning that what was being billed as urban renewal--big housing projects, highway building, creation of business districts, etc.--was actually destroying neighborhoods and creating more problems than it was solving. Subsequent events of the past forty years have certainly borne out her argument that the planners were killing cities. An apt companion piece for her book would be The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro, wherein the author demonstrates in detail that these plans came to be more about the exercise of power by the civil "servants" than about actually helping city dwellers. The high rise housing projects that blight our urban landscape stand as eloquent testimony to the fact that, regardless of their original intentions, the bureaucrats of the Great Society wasted billions of dollars pursuing disastrous policies and left only ruin in their wake.

Of course, Urban Renewal was just one aspect of the liberal do-gooders sustained assault on the poor families of our great cities. Similarly interventionist--and equally deleterious in their effect--were ideas like Welfare, the Sexual Revolution, and so on... The entire panoply of supposedly benevolent government programs of the post-Depression era all had presumably unintended, though entirely foreseeable, adverse consequences for their supposed beneficiaries. Jacobs' thesis is easily expanded, as indeed she has in successive books, to encompass all centralized government planning. The alternative vision she offers, of more organic development (basically allowing Free Market forces to function), is certainly the prevailing notion today, at least rhetorically. It is surely no coincidence that the rebirth of cities like New York has come about under the leadership of Republican mayors. But one need only look at New York's schools to realize that the bureaucrats are fighting a tenacious rearguard action. Virtually the entire book could be applied to today's education system.

One surefire sign that this book still strikes a nerve among the liberal elites is its inexcusable exclusion from the Modern Library Top 100 List. Of course, that list includes instead the insipid The City in History (1961) (Lewis Mumford 1895-1990)(see Orrin's review). Mumford's book is mostly self evident historical analysis, devoid of ideas. In sharp contrast, Jacobs' book is all idea, timeless ideas, and a slap in the face of the modern statists of the Left and the enormous hubris which convinces them that they should make our decisions for us.

One thing I especially love about books like Jacobs', is that they remind folks that conservatives aren't merely reactionaries--sniping at noble but misguided social policies only after they've failed--but actually foresaw the catastrophic effect that Big Government would have on our lives and warned against it at the time. On the other hand, it's kind of frightening how much of this book remains timely and germane today; but in recent years it does at least seem as if Jacobs' vision is finally winning. Let us hope so.

GRADE: A-

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Summary: A Constellation of Ideas About City Planning
Review: This 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, a one-time writer for architectural magazines in New York City, turned the world of city planning on its head. The author, who possessed no formal training in architecture or city planning, relied on personal observations of her surroundings in Greenwich Village in New York City to supply ammunition for her charges against the grand muftis of the architectural profession. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" consists mostly of common sense observations, but there is also a good amount of statistical information, economics, sociology, and some philosophy at the base of the author's arguments. This 1993 Modern Library reprint seeks to bring Jacobs's work to a whole new generation of readers, a necessity when one realizes that a majority of the problems plaguing cities in 1961 continue to be a problem today.

Jacobs begins her book with a brief history of where modern city planning came from. According to the author, the mess we call cities today emerged from Utopian visionaries from Europe and America beginning in the 19th century. Figures such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, and Daniel Burnham all had a significantly dreadful impact on how urban areas are built and rebuilt. These men all envisioned the city as a dreadful place, full of overcrowding, crime, disease, and ugliness. Howard wished to destroy big cities completely in order to replace them with small towns, or "Garden Cities," made up of small populations. Similar in thought to Howard, Mumford argued for a decentralization of cities into thinned out areas resembling towns. Le Corbusier, says Jacobs, inaugurated yet another harmful plan for cities: the "Radiant City." A radiant city consists of skyscrapers surrounded by wide swaths of parks where vast concentrations of people herded into one area could live and work. Burnham's contribution to planning was "City Monumental," where all of the grand buildings (libraries, government buildings, concert halls, landmarks) of a city could be clustered in one agglomeration separated from the dirty, bad city. Jacobs writes that all of these ideas continue to exert influence on the modern city, and that all of these ideas do not work.

For Jacobs, the key to a successful city rests on one word: diversity. This is not specifically an ethnic diversity, although Jacobs does vaguely include this in her arguments. Rather, diversity means different buildings, different residences, different businesses, and different amounts of people in an area at different times. The antithesis of diversity is what we see today on a stroll through downtown: a bland uniformity of office buildings, apartment dwellings, and houses that stretch as far the eyes can see. In the author's view, this lack of diversification leads to economic stagnation, slums, crime, and a host of other horrors that are all too familiar to viewers of the evening news. Especially egregious to Jacobs is the tendency to isolate low-income people in towering projects surrounded by empty space. The lack of embedded businesses in these areas, along with closed in hallways and elevators (which Jacobs calls "interior sidewalks and streets") creates a breeding ground for criminal elements and bad morale among the residents. Cities that work best employ a wide range of diverse interests that attract, not repel, people. Unfortunately, bureaucrats and social planners always believe top down planning is better than bottom up initiative. Jacobs tries to show the fallacy of social planning.

The amount of ground covered in this book is amazing. The author examines the role and practicality of parks, sidewalks, business interests, city government, streets, automobiles versus pedestrians, and boundaries. Repeatedly, Jacobs discovered fatal errors in how planners build cities. She found parks placed in the sunless shadows of skyscrapers or at the end of dead end streets, narrow sidewalks incapable of carrying heavy foot traffic, city blocks so long that people avoided walking down them, and city governments too fragmented to carry on effective management. All of these things eventually led to abandonment and degradation. Even worse, when a planned section of the city failed the planners came back and razed it to the ground in order to replace it with yet more failure.

One of Jacobs's failings in the book is that she never seems to make the connection between urban planning and social control. The housing projects are a great example. By isolating the poor, blacks as well as whites and other ethnic minorities, the state practices an effective control over these people's lives. This book inspired me to check into the fate of Cabrini-Green, Chicago's notorious housing projects that served as a role model for the abject uselessness of urban planning. These projects are in the process of being razed and replaced by mixed-income houses that, if Jacobs is accurate, may thrive due to the nearby presence of shopping areas and businesses. Of course, the planners are still in the game because they are sending most of the poor residents to other areas of the city.

I am probably not the best person to judge the merits of this book because I have never been to one of Jacobs's "Great Cities." I had difficulty imagining some of the layouts she mentioned in the book due to the simple fact that I have never seen them. Despite this small problem, there is still plenty of information in this book that does make perfect sense. You do not need to live in New York City or Philadelphia to recognize that parks with no sunlight will not be a big hit with the city denizens, or that older buildings are necessary to a neighborhood because they allow small businesses to exist with low overhead costs. "The Death and Life of Great Cities," despite its age, is still a relevant book well worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: a classic
Review: This book is a classic study in amateur sociology: what makes city neighborhoods work, why areas are safe and unsafe, fascinating descriptions of parks, neighborhoods, the impact of the length of blocks, public housing projects. Especially if you live in New York, Boston, Chicago, or Philadelphia and are familiar with the areas she describes, but even if you are not, her observations are acute and her analysis is superb. As a municipal government employee, I think this should be required reading for everyone in city government.

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Summary: A suggested movie to set the tone for the book
Review: This book is an amazing analysis of cities and how they work. Jacobs begins by observing the city around her, New York. She takes note of which neighborhoods are thriving and which ones should be avoided and analyzes their differences. For instance, she notes that neighborhoods with mixed usage have people of different ages and backgrounds on the street in public places all day long. Since there are people around all day, no one is going to get away with doing anything antisocial. But empty streets or neighborhoods that don't have eyes constantly watching what is happening are risky places to leave your car or other valuables. Similarly, Jacobs discusses what kinds of park design are likely to be successful, and which parks will be shunned, and why. She argues for the necessity of diversity of people, buildings, and development.

What's most amazing about this book is that Jacobs wrote this in the beginning of the 1960's, at a time when government redevelopment projects were leveling the inner-cities. At the time, Jacobs must have sounded like a crackpot because her ideas where so diametrically opposed to the accepted standards of the time. However, time has shown that she was indeed correct on so many of her points. This book is essential reading for city planners and social scientists. But it would be of interest to all.