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The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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.
472 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1961
About the author
Jane Jacobs
31 books606 followersJane Jacobs, OC, O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.
Along with her well-known printed works, Jacobs is equally well-known for organizing grassroots efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and after moving to Canada in 1968, equally influential in canceling the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of highways under construction.
Along with her well-known printed works, Jacobs is equally well-known for organizing grassroots efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and after moving to Canada in 1968, equally influential in canceling the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of highways under construction.
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May 22, 2023
This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers.
I picked up this book immediately after finishing The Power Broker, and I highly recommend this sequence to anyone who has the time. The conflict between Robert Moses, czar-like planner of New York City for almost half a century, and Jane Jacobs, ordinary citizen and activist, has become the source of legend. There is a book about it, Wrestling with Moses, a well-made documentary, Citizen Jane, and an opera, A Marvelous Order, with a libretto written by a Pulitzer Prize winner (I haven’t seen it). The two make an excellent hero and villain. Moses, the autocratic, power-hungry city-planner who eviscerates neighborhoods and bulldozes homes. Jacobs, the underdog autodidact, community organizer, defender of Greenwich Village and Washington Square Park.
The two did not only clash in life—with Jacobs leading protests to stop Moses’s highways—but, more importantly, in thought. More diametrically opposed conceptions of the city could hardly be imagined.
Moses was, at bottom, a follower of Le Corbusier, a modernist who put forward the idea of the Radiant City. The idea was to create a city with all the different functions in separate zones—sections for retail, business, manufacturing, residence—and to create as much green space as possible by putting everything in high-rise buildings, freeing up land for parks. These buildings would be connected, not by ordinary roads, but by giant superhighways. In a way, it is a conception of the city that is anti-city: there would be no streets, no corner shops, no neighborhoods. The impulse was, I believe, originally progressive: to erase differences in class by creating uniform conditions for everyone. But in Moses’s hands this philosophy became deeply reactionary: isolate the poor people of color in projects and build highways for the car-owning middle class.
Jacobs was absolutely opposed to this model. There are innumerable theoretical differences between Jacobs and Moses, but I think the most essential difference is this: Jacobs loved cities. She loved walking around cities, chatting with neighbors, gazing at street-life, making small-talk at local shops, sitting on stoops and leaning out windows. And so her idea of urban planning is not to pack everyone into high-rise buildings to get them off the street, but the reverse: to get as many people on the street as possible. She loves the messiness of cities. A healthy city is not, for her, a work of art, consciously designed. It is more like a biological organism, shaped by natural selection into a well-functioning, complex, interrelated, constantly-changing whole. Healthy cities are not made by planners but by ordinary people.
Since the publication of this book, Jacobs’s ideas have become enormously influential—so influential, in fact, that it is difficult to see anything radical about what she says. One of her basic principles, for example, is that a well-used street is a safe street, because the presence of many bystanders discourages crime. I suspect that this seems obvious to most people. But when you look at the projects that Moses and his ilk built—high-rise buildings surrounded by lawns, with no shops, restaurants, or anything else to attract people to street level—you realize how totally out of touch they were. Indeed, the whole idea of housing projects sounds like a recipe for disaster: pack all the poor into one area, set income limits so anyone successful has to move out, discourage all street activity to eliminate a sense of community. And in practice the projects were disasters—centers of delinquency and despair.
Jacobs’s recipe for creating a healthy neighborhood has four ingredients: (1) mixed uses, so that different kinds of people are drawn to the area at different times of day for different reasons; (2) a mixture of old and new buildings, so that there is low-rent space available for small businesses and low-income residents; (3) small blocks, so that streets are not isolated from one another; and (4) sufficient density of residents, to create the necessary amount of economic and social activity. The goal is to produce a neighborhood like her own Greenwich Village: with lots of street life, with successful residents who choose to stay long-term, with local stores and restaurants and cafes, and with a steady influx of immigrants.
To use a metaphor, Jacobs thinks we should try to create an ecosystem with a lot of biodiversity; and to do this we need a lot of biomass and a lot of separate niches. The essential fact about ecosystems—which also applies to cities—is that they are a delicate balance of different elements, deeply complex, shaped by the action of countless individual players over countless eons. This level of complexity is baffling to the human mind, which is why we so often disrupt ecosystems by trying to “improve” them. Urban planning does the same thing with cities.
The Moses approach (to continue the metaphor) is agricultural rather than natural: sweep away the natural environment and create an artificial monoculture. Monocultures never spring up in healthy ecosystems. Lacking biodiversity, they are inherently vulnerable and difficult to maintain. We expend enormous amounts of money and energy defending our wheat fields from vermin and disease. The same principle applies to the housing projects, which need constant police surveillance to remain remotely viable.
This gives a taste of Jacobs’s guiding idea, perhaps, but I can hardly do justice to the wealth of thought in this book. Jacobs has convincing sociological insights into what makes streets safe or unsafe, what makes city economies thrive or stagnate, why housing projects fail and slums form, why parks are used and unused, why city governments are so often inefficient and ineffective, and even includes her ideas on the history and progress of science. In a way, this book is a constant rebuke to academe. At the time, academic urban planning was entirely stagnant, relying on ideas and principles that hadn’t been modified in thirty years and which were never very good to begin with. It took someone like Jacobs, an autodidact without a college degree, to break up the orthodoxy—and she had to endure a lot of sexism and condescension in the process.
What made her so successful, and what has made this book so enduring, was a rare combination of talents: keen observation, a highly original mind, the ability to think on multiple scales at once, hard-nosed practicality, and a healthy sense of social responsibility. In this book she relies on her wide and somewhat eclectic reading, but even more on her own eyes and ears. She has visited successful and unsuccessful neighborhoods and had talked to their residents. She has led protests and was a frequent visitor of City Hall. When you read this book, it is easy to see why she has become something of a hero for many citizens and academics: she is absolutely unafraid of authority, either intellectual or political, and she had the mental and personal resources to win.
It is, of course, ironic that her ideas, so heterodox, eventually became the new orthodoxy of urban planning. When Jacobs passed away in 2006, there were many who called for an end to her intellectual reign.
The most common criticism, I believe, is that Jacobs did not anticipate gentrification—the gradual takeover of neighborhoods by the affluent. This is the most talked-about problem in New York City today. There’s a popular blog, Vanishing New York, which documents all the small business and local establishments being pushed out by big money. Jacobs’s own former neighborhood, Greenwich Village, is a prime example: now it is nothing like the bustling, bohemian, working-class place it was in her day. I’m not sure if Jacobs can be fairly blamed for this, however. For one, she anticipates how successful neighborhood can become “too successful” and lose their vitality as more money pours in. What’s more, she was very concerned with maintaining housing for low-income tenants within successful neighborhoods, and includes a novel plan to do so in this book.
In any case, this book is not just a recipe for creating neighborhoods. In an oblique way, it presents an entire ideology. Jacobs is a proponent of what you might call progressive decentralism. Normally, decentralism is associated with the right, at least here in the US, but Jacobs make a strong case for leftist decentralism. Large, vertically-oriented government structures simply cannot understand or respond to individual citizens’ needs. The answer is to empower local government so that citizens can shape their own neighborhoods. Government must help the disadvantaged, but must do so by cooperating with local forces and private individuals—exploiting economic and social elements that naturally arise, instead of imposing its own cumbrous structure.
This book can be read even more broadly, as an attack on suburbia and modern isolation. Cities are the future, as Jacobs reminds us—hotbeds of ideas and centers of population growth; and cities are natural products, created by the free choice of individuals, places that organically foster their own sense of identity and community. Suburbia is a rejection of cities: artificial products created through the deliberate policies of planners. Not shaped by free choice, they are not organic communities; and even if they escape being unsafe, like the projects, they foster that constant specter of modern life: isolation. When you hear Jacobs describe her own neighborhood in Greenwich Village, you get a sense of what so many places nowadays lack: neighborliness, friendliness, a group of semi-strangers and sidewalk acquaintances who will go out of their way to help each other, a sense of communal ownership and belonging.
In sum, this book is a true classic: ensconced in an intellectual climate that no longer exists, responding to contemporary problems with eloquence and insight, and championing a perspective that is still vital.
June 5, 2020
My favorite quotes from my re-read of this book last week (with city eye candy):
On TRUST:
"The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all." (p. 56)
On PRIVACY:
"A good city street neighborhood achieves a marvel of balance between its people's determination to have essential privacy and their simultaneous wishes for differing degrees of contact, enjoyment or help from the people around." (p.59)
On the need for CASUAL CONTACTS and PUBLIC SPACE:
"Under [a well-compartmentalized local] system, it is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offense, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships. It is possible to be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different from oneself..." (p. 62)
"Here it is necessary to take issue with a common belief about cities—the belief that uses of low status drive out uses of high status. This is not how cities behave... People or uses with more money at their command or greater respectability can fairly easily supplant those less prosperous or those of less status... The reverse seldom happens." (p. 97)
On ENGINEERING SOCIAL TURNAROUND:
"It is fashionable to suppose that certain touchstones of the good life will create good neighborhoods—schools, parks, clean housing and the like. How easy life would be if this were so! How charming to control a complicated and ornery society by bestowing upon it rather simple physical goodies. In real life, cause and effect are not so simple." (p. 112)
On CROWDS and MORALITY:
"People gathered in concentrations of big-city size and density can be felt to be an automatic—if necessary—evil. This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers... On the other hand, people gathered in concentrations of city size and density... are desirable because they are the source of immense vitality... a great and exuberant richness of differences and possibilities, many of these differences unique and unpredictable and all the more valuable because they are." (p.220)
On the BEAUTY of "CHAOS":
"Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order." (p. 222)
On the UGLINESS of "ORDER":
"Homogeneity... poses very puzzling esthetic problems. If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is—sameness—it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. In [such] places... you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west... It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented." (p. 223)
On DESIGNING FOR HUMANS:
"Genuine differences in the city architectural scene express... [Jacobs quoting Eugene Raskin:] 'the interweaving of human patterns. They are full of people doing different things, with different reasons and different ends in view, and the architecture reflects and expresses this difference... Being human, human beings are what interest us most. In architecture as in literature and the drama, it is the richness of human variation that gives vitality and color to the human setting... Considering the hazard of monotony... the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they permit an entire area to be devoted to a single use.'" (p. 229)
"[Jacobs quoting Paul J. Tillich:] 'Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.'" (p. 238)
Why LASTING SUCCESS IN CITIES IS HARD:
"A diversified mixture of uses at some place in the city becomes outstandingly popular and successful as a whole. Because of the location's success, which is invariably based on flourishing and magnetic diversity, ardent competition for space in this locality develops. It is taken up in what amounts to the economic equivalent of a fad." (p. 243)
"[Slum clearance and project-style urban renewal] fails because it tries to overcome causes of trouble by diddling with symptoms... Conventional planning approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so." (p. 271)
On ASSIMILATING NEWCOMERS:
"People are accomodated and assimilated, not in undigestible floods but as gradual additions, in neighborhoods capable of accepting and handling strangers in a civilized fashion... They quickly assimilate into the public street life and are lively and competent at holding up their end. These very same people could hardly act as they do within the community, nor would they be likely to stay put as long, were they part of a tumultuous replacement throng..." (p. 283)
"When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art." (p. 372)
Read
September 23, 2019Impassioned, if dated, The Death and Life of Great American Cities sets out to catalogue the conditions that make a large city diverse, safe, and vibrant. Jacobs begins her work by critiquing modernist urban planning as pseudo scientific and dangerously out of touch with reality, before she turns to examining why and how some city neighborhoods prosper while others decline. Focusing mainly on New York, her home, the author offers great insight into what makes urban life teem with vitality, and then repeats those insights over and over; she’s also short on policy suggestions, and her analysis fails to fully account for the role race plays in housing, gentrification, and disinvestment. The prose is alternately tedious and moving—the sections in which Jacobs describes street life shine, as do those that first build her thesis.
September 25, 2007
I know some people who will balk at my 3-star rating, so I will explain myself. As a body of work, it is amazing and I adore Jane Jacobs. However, a good portion of this book still manages to be dull, despite being very important. (I can't help it!) I dig nonfiction, and I think 3 stars for a non-fiction book means it's pretty darn good, because who ever finished a cruddy non-fiction book unless they were taking a class? So, I read it voluntarily and give it 3 stars on the highly-sensitive and mysterious non-fiction rating system.
Read
December 30, 2020Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has been on my mental to-read list since I read The Power Broker, which was long ago. It was not the book I imagined it to be, Robert Moses here lurks mostly unmentioned darting behind some of the paragraphs, very rarely making an appearance in an actual sentence.
Jacobs view of the city struck me as Darwinian - the more life there is, the more life there can be. The city is an ecosystem, and diversity promotes diversity. The problem in her view is that zoning regulations, slum clearances, road building - particularly driving express routes through neighbourhoods, and economic specialisation tend to have the opposite effect, they reduce diversity and cause parts of the city to die back.
In part she attributes this to a tradition of urban reformers and town planners, from Ebenezer Howard and his garden cities onwards, who did not much like urban life and thought of the small town or the village as the ideal human community, there influence for her is much like having Teetotallers running the bars, breweries and distilleries.
She also consciously or unconsciously draws on the idea of complex systems (p.452) - the city is a complex, diverse system, it's management and government require both an overview and detailed local knowledge. Political and administrative structures tend to facilitate the first, but not the second, leading to top down interventions whether slum clearance or cutting new roads through the cityscape either causing more harm than good or shifting the problem around . She says: "The administrative structure itself is at fault because it has been adapted beyond the point that mere adaptations can serve. This is how human affairs often evolve. There comes a point, at increased levels of complication, when actual invention is required" (p.428).
All in all I felt Jacobs was stronger on the death side of the equation, she is very interesting on what was going wrong in the US city at a granular level, why certain parks are hardly used, or only by the kinds of users who frighten the rest away, why certain libraries are busier than others, why some streets are safer or feel safer than others. I was not overwhelmed by the life side, which seemed limited to the idea that urban government needed to be redesigned away from vertical silos in favour of something more horizontal and decentralised in its structure.
She has an interesting environmental edge to her thinking (pp.459-461), the city in her view works in harmony with the countryside, the enemy of nature is the suburban sprawl: does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?" (p.462)
I found it very interesting - though over long, but I wondered if her insights were most applicable to the USA and other colonial/settler societies which from their beginnings were keen to control space, and limit who could live where and to segregate. She seemed much less interested in public transport and less keen on public housing than I imagine her contemporaries in Europe might have been. Her book reminded me very strongly of a saying attributed to Dostoevsky that the two points closest together on a circle were also the two furthest apart, because in many ways the operation and activities of US city authorities in the middle of the twentieth century sounded remarkably Stalinist to me with idealisation of big concrete prospects designed for motorised traffic flanked by massive concrete blocks. Curiously after departing New York, Jacobs and family settled in Toronto, which is not generally held up as an exemplar of the kind of organic city that Jacobs argues in favour of.
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves"
As chance would have it this was also one of the book's on the late Ted Schmeckpeper's want to read list, I imagine that he would have been positive about it, despite the glaring absence of discussion about the role of baseball pitches in major cities as cultural and economic anchor points for communities, perhaps too he might have added his own reflections on US and Australian cities to those made by Jacobs.
Jacobs view of the city struck me as Darwinian - the more life there is, the more life there can be. The city is an ecosystem, and diversity promotes diversity. The problem in her view is that zoning regulations, slum clearances, road building - particularly driving express routes through neighbourhoods, and economic specialisation tend to have the opposite effect, they reduce diversity and cause parts of the city to die back.
In part she attributes this to a tradition of urban reformers and town planners, from Ebenezer Howard and his garden cities onwards, who did not much like urban life and thought of the small town or the village as the ideal human community, there influence for her is much like having Teetotallers running the bars, breweries and distilleries.
She also consciously or unconsciously draws on the idea of complex systems (p.452) - the city is a complex, diverse system, it's management and government require both an overview and detailed local knowledge. Political and administrative structures tend to facilitate the first, but not the second, leading to top down interventions whether slum clearance or cutting new roads through the cityscape either causing more harm than good or shifting the problem around . She says: "The administrative structure itself is at fault because it has been adapted beyond the point that mere adaptations can serve. This is how human affairs often evolve. There comes a point, at increased levels of complication, when actual invention is required" (p.428).
All in all I felt Jacobs was stronger on the death side of the equation, she is very interesting on what was going wrong in the US city at a granular level, why certain parks are hardly used, or only by the kinds of users who frighten the rest away, why certain libraries are busier than others, why some streets are safer or feel safer than others. I was not overwhelmed by the life side, which seemed limited to the idea that urban government needed to be redesigned away from vertical silos in favour of something more horizontal and decentralised in its structure.
She has an interesting environmental edge to her thinking (pp.459-461), the city in her view works in harmony with the countryside, the enemy of nature is the suburban sprawl: does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?" (p.462)
I found it very interesting - though over long, but I wondered if her insights were most applicable to the USA and other colonial/settler societies which from their beginnings were keen to control space, and limit who could live where and to segregate. She seemed much less interested in public transport and less keen on public housing than I imagine her contemporaries in Europe might have been. Her book reminded me very strongly of a saying attributed to Dostoevsky that the two points closest together on a circle were also the two furthest apart, because in many ways the operation and activities of US city authorities in the middle of the twentieth century sounded remarkably Stalinist to me with idealisation of big concrete prospects designed for motorised traffic flanked by massive concrete blocks. Curiously after departing New York, Jacobs and family settled in Toronto, which is not generally held up as an exemplar of the kind of organic city that Jacobs argues in favour of.
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves"
As chance would have it this was also one of the book's on the late Ted Schmeckpeper's want to read list, I imagine that he would have been positive about it, despite the glaring absence of discussion about the role of baseball pitches in major cities as cultural and economic anchor points for communities, perhaps too he might have added his own reflections on US and Australian cities to those made by Jacobs.
May 27, 2010
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was both a frustrating and an illuminating book.
It was frustrating because it was long, and in many parts dull: I was yawning at 3 o'clock in the afternoon while drinking coffee and reading this. This book is a fabulous soporific and I recommend it heartily to insomniacs everywhere.
It was also frustrating because it is showing its age. Jacobs longs for diverse neighborhoods with fruit stands and butcher shops that aren't coming back, filled with bored housewives that can spend their time staring out windows and scolding naughty children playing with marbles. The supermarket is here to stay, and stay-at-home moms (or dads) are uncommon. Jacobs also has a ridiculous idea of what people enjoy about city life--I, for one, would not find it charming to hear a midnight bagpipe serenade!
It was also frustrating because it offered up far more problems with contemporary city planning than it did solutions for city problems. She was antagonistic towards contemporary city planning, and for good reason: their actions inevitably led to a reduction in neighborhood diversity, one of Jabobs' key elements for a successful city neighborhood. But her solutions were few (other than to stop practices that had proven failures, but that continue to be implemented today, 50 years later) and the few solutions she had struck me as nearly as inherently flawed as the practices she despised.
It was illuminating because it revealed the many reasons why low-income housing projects failed time and time again. I had always thought of it as a failure of modernist architecture, which in part it was, but there were many more reasons. Entire neighborhoods were torn apart, pulling apart existing social orders, and put into a new neighborhood completely lacking in diversity (in terms of businesses, dwelling types, and people). Anyone who lived in the projects who improved their financial situation was forced to move out, thus insuring that the projects would always remain poor (and lacking in economic diversity). There were parks and common areas, but possibly too many: parks and common areas that are underutilized become dangerous. This is one area where Jacobs' recommendations were possibly useful, as the federal government has incorporated many of her ideas to subsidize low-income tenants in private housing, rather than in monolithic government-owned housing sites.
(Frankly, the talk about projects reminded me very much of the University of Michigan's Bursley Hall. It feels wrong for a middle-class suburbanite to complain about his college dormitory in relation to low-income housing projects, but I hate that place with a passion, and I will celebrate when that building is torn down. Housing 1200 college students together in an isolated location cut off from town or the rest of campus is an abominable idea.)
Naturally I enjoyed the chapter about the automobile, and found her commentary interesting. Every time we make a concession to automobile traffic to reduce congestion, or increase parking, we are taking away the very things that make a city pedestrian friendly. Traffic and parking concessions happen slowly and over time, so she argues that taking them back for sidewalks and storefronts can only happen slowly and over time as well.
Some other illuminating points: it revealed the danger of "cataclysmic money" (large, irregular investments), something I've already read about regarding science funding. Slow and steady investment over time is the best way to encourage perpetual growth. Vertical silos of city management often cause the departments to overlook unique differences in individual neighborhoods--this made me appreciate the structure of large universities more, where each school operates with a large amount of independence.
I finally read this book after I was publicly complaining about Birmingham, Ala., and attributed its flaws primarily to a lack of population density. Although Jabobs does cite density as a necessity for a vibrant city, Murph, a friend and city planner, recommended I read this book. Indeed, Jacobs ties things together in the last chapter and reveals that thinking about city issues in terms of one or two variables, such as population per square mile, is unproductive. Jacobs says the following in regards to city parks, but I think the statement can be applied much more broadly to avoid reductionist strategies:
"This is a far cry from the simple problem of ratios of open space to ratios of population; but there is no use wishing it were a simpler problem or trying to make it a simpler problem, because in real life it is not a simpler problem."
If you've made it to the end of this overly long review, I'll give you the one-sentence summary: Utopian city planning leads to urban Dystopias, and urban diversity--in its buildings, in its uses, in its people--is the best way to achieve a vibrant city.
It was frustrating because it was long, and in many parts dull: I was yawning at 3 o'clock in the afternoon while drinking coffee and reading this. This book is a fabulous soporific and I recommend it heartily to insomniacs everywhere.
It was also frustrating because it is showing its age. Jacobs longs for diverse neighborhoods with fruit stands and butcher shops that aren't coming back, filled with bored housewives that can spend their time staring out windows and scolding naughty children playing with marbles. The supermarket is here to stay, and stay-at-home moms (or dads) are uncommon. Jacobs also has a ridiculous idea of what people enjoy about city life--I, for one, would not find it charming to hear a midnight bagpipe serenade!
It was also frustrating because it offered up far more problems with contemporary city planning than it did solutions for city problems. She was antagonistic towards contemporary city planning, and for good reason: their actions inevitably led to a reduction in neighborhood diversity, one of Jabobs' key elements for a successful city neighborhood. But her solutions were few (other than to stop practices that had proven failures, but that continue to be implemented today, 50 years later) and the few solutions she had struck me as nearly as inherently flawed as the practices she despised.
It was illuminating because it revealed the many reasons why low-income housing projects failed time and time again. I had always thought of it as a failure of modernist architecture, which in part it was, but there were many more reasons. Entire neighborhoods were torn apart, pulling apart existing social orders, and put into a new neighborhood completely lacking in diversity (in terms of businesses, dwelling types, and people). Anyone who lived in the projects who improved their financial situation was forced to move out, thus insuring that the projects would always remain poor (and lacking in economic diversity). There were parks and common areas, but possibly too many: parks and common areas that are underutilized become dangerous. This is one area where Jacobs' recommendations were possibly useful, as the federal government has incorporated many of her ideas to subsidize low-income tenants in private housing, rather than in monolithic government-owned housing sites.
(Frankly, the talk about projects reminded me very much of the University of Michigan's Bursley Hall. It feels wrong for a middle-class suburbanite to complain about his college dormitory in relation to low-income housing projects, but I hate that place with a passion, and I will celebrate when that building is torn down. Housing 1200 college students together in an isolated location cut off from town or the rest of campus is an abominable idea.)
Naturally I enjoyed the chapter about the automobile, and found her commentary interesting. Every time we make a concession to automobile traffic to reduce congestion, or increase parking, we are taking away the very things that make a city pedestrian friendly. Traffic and parking concessions happen slowly and over time, so she argues that taking them back for sidewalks and storefronts can only happen slowly and over time as well.
Some other illuminating points: it revealed the danger of "cataclysmic money" (large, irregular investments), something I've already read about regarding science funding. Slow and steady investment over time is the best way to encourage perpetual growth. Vertical silos of city management often cause the departments to overlook unique differences in individual neighborhoods--this made me appreciate the structure of large universities more, where each school operates with a large amount of independence.
I finally read this book after I was publicly complaining about Birmingham, Ala., and attributed its flaws primarily to a lack of population density. Although Jabobs does cite density as a necessity for a vibrant city, Murph, a friend and city planner, recommended I read this book. Indeed, Jacobs ties things together in the last chapter and reveals that thinking about city issues in terms of one or two variables, such as population per square mile, is unproductive. Jacobs says the following in regards to city parks, but I think the statement can be applied much more broadly to avoid reductionist strategies:
"This is a far cry from the simple problem of ratios of open space to ratios of population; but there is no use wishing it were a simpler problem or trying to make it a simpler problem, because in real life it is not a simpler problem."
If you've made it to the end of this overly long review, I'll give you the one-sentence summary: Utopian city planning leads to urban Dystopias, and urban diversity--in its buildings, in its uses, in its people--is the best way to achieve a vibrant city.
August 25, 2016
You know that feeling you get when someone expresses a political belief that you share, but explains the position using arguments that you find unavailing, anecdotal, or specious? That's what this book felt like. It was like de Tocqueville takes on modern American cities: inductive reasoning applied selectively to undergird a set of beliefs and proselytize for their superiority.
I had such high hopes for this one, but it dragged on relentlessly. I made it about halfway through this book before abandoning the effort. How many pages can Jacobs expect us to endure being browbeaten about the preferability of short blocks over long ones? About how people misjudge Greenwich Village and Boston's North End to be slums (ha! I guess this was kinda true somewhat recently)? And what would Jane Jacobs have to say about our current tony and healthy urban neighborhoods, which thrive despite the (certainly lamentable) absence of any type of coherent community structure, Jacobs' sine qua non for healthy neighborhood dynamics? It's almost as if Jacobs thinks her own Sesame Street cast of characters is a prerequisite for every healthy urban biome, because without the proper complement of kibitzers shouting unsolicited weekend bus route information to strangers and Joe Cornacchia, delicatessen-proprietor-and-premonitory-glance-giver-extraordinaire, anomie would prevail!
I'm happy that New York looks more like Jacobs' vision than like Moses', but this feels like it could have been adequately conveyed in pamphlet form.
I had such high hopes for this one, but it dragged on relentlessly. I made it about halfway through this book before abandoning the effort. How many pages can Jacobs expect us to endure being browbeaten about the preferability of short blocks over long ones? About how people misjudge Greenwich Village and Boston's North End to be slums (ha! I guess this was kinda true somewhat recently)? And what would Jane Jacobs have to say about our current tony and healthy urban neighborhoods, which thrive despite the (certainly lamentable) absence of any type of coherent community structure, Jacobs' sine qua non for healthy neighborhood dynamics? It's almost as if Jacobs thinks her own Sesame Street cast of characters is a prerequisite for every healthy urban biome, because without the proper complement of kibitzers shouting unsolicited weekend bus route information to strangers and Joe Cornacchia, delicatessen-proprietor-and-premonitory-glance-giver-extraordinaire, anomie would prevail!
I'm happy that New York looks more like Jacobs' vision than like Moses', but this feels like it could have been adequately conveyed in pamphlet form.
November 26, 2023
One of the best books I've ever read, and one of the few that divide my life into two parts: before reading "Death and Life", & after. I can't walk through a city without seeing it through Jacobs' eyes.
June 22, 2012
This is one of the most important books about cities ever written. It's what helps you understand why cities work, why they don't work, what makes a neighborhood, what destroys neighborhoods and how almost everything city planners and governments think matters, doesn't. Seth Roberts is probably the biggest Jane Jacobs fan there is. He's what she calls an insider-outsider (insider in terms of understanding, outsider in terms of career). She was an activist and a student who understood the system but wasn't wedded to it or dependent on it for a living. It was this unique position that gave her the freedom and the perspective to explain the concept of American cities (and what's killing them) in a way that no one had ever done before. I also think that a lot of Jacobs' ideas about diversity, mixed uses, isolation, wealth and government can be applied to other parts of our lives. The way she gets to the core of neighborhood, passing up the easy or obvious signs that others are mistakenly distracted with, is impressive. There is a great Malcolm Gladwell article where he tries to use some of her ideas to dissect office culture-it's a good start and example about other canvases for her ideas.
December 4, 2008
An urban classic that remains applicable.
Jacobs makes a strong case and repeats it over and over.
Jacobs makes a strong case and repeats it over and over.
February 26, 2022
can a book slap?
July 3, 2011
One of the books that all planners are supposed to have read, I know it's a bit shocking that I have only now read it. And regrettable. It deserves every ounce of it's status as a classic (if such status were to be measured in ounces). It's eminently readable (and isn't that a pleasure in a book of this kind), but also incredibly insightful and of course I love how it resonates so brilliantly with my experience living in many different cities while toppling most accepted planning theory. The more diverse cities are, the more people love them. The more people on the street at all different times of day, the safer and more enjoyable those streets are. High foot traffic allows a glorious flowering in the kinds of local businesses to spring up, and those in turn provide stability and attraction to the street. The longer people stay in neighborhoods and the more they feel pride and ownership and love for them, the better those neighborhoods become. It's brilliant to be able to walk out of your door and buy what you need within a few blocks, getting to know the shop owners as you do so. Kids growing up in this environment feel a sense of civic engagement and helpfulness, and are accountable and supervised by a multitude of friendly and known adults. And who could know better the improvements and changes needed for a neighborhood than those who live there?
And yet planning over decades has worked to destroy all this.
This is a practical and eminently sensible account of what makes city neighbourhoods work. I think its weaknesses are highlighted by the fact that it is a rare popular book read by those who are not planners, and accepted as a classic amongst urban planners themselves, and yet, although written in 1961, has had remarkably little effect on how planning occurs or how urban development takes place. This points to the questions that Jacobs answers only superficially -- why exactly planning and development have taken the shape they have. That is truly a tragedy for it is full of brilliant and insightfully practical suggestions on how to improve both. It does look at the process of redlining, it has some analysis of racism and classism and prejudice, but not enough. And ultimately the driving forces of profit and capitalism are left unquestioned. To find those you have read David Harvey and Neil Smith and a host of others. I don't think that makes the insight offered by Jacobs any less, simply incomplete, and highlights the fact that a more fundamental change in how we develop and plan our cities is required, one based upon need and increasing vitality rather than the greatest profit.
And yet planning over decades has worked to destroy all this.
This is a practical and eminently sensible account of what makes city neighbourhoods work. I think its weaknesses are highlighted by the fact that it is a rare popular book read by those who are not planners, and accepted as a classic amongst urban planners themselves, and yet, although written in 1961, has had remarkably little effect on how planning occurs or how urban development takes place. This points to the questions that Jacobs answers only superficially -- why exactly planning and development have taken the shape they have. That is truly a tragedy for it is full of brilliant and insightfully practical suggestions on how to improve both. It does look at the process of redlining, it has some analysis of racism and classism and prejudice, but not enough. And ultimately the driving forces of profit and capitalism are left unquestioned. To find those you have read David Harvey and Neil Smith and a host of others. I don't think that makes the insight offered by Jacobs any less, simply incomplete, and highlights the fact that a more fundamental change in how we develop and plan our cities is required, one based upon need and increasing vitality rather than the greatest profit.
November 20, 2021
I hate to bust on a book that had such groundbreaking importance in city planning, but that was over 50 years ago and this book hasn’t aged well at all. The author relies way too much on anecdotal stories of her fictional Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, and not nearly enough on facts. Instead of this poorly written personal memoir, I would suggest you read Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere. I did, and it has made all of the difference.
Or instead of reading The Geography of Nowhere, you could just come to Spain and visit my neighborhood and check out the gorgeous city of Valencia. You will soon learn everything you need to know about how to construct a vibrant, modern, and livable city.
You begin by making apartment buildings from 5 to 11 floors, depending on the surrounding area. You put this around a block with the back of the units facing into an open area away from the street (this is called a patio de manzana in Spanish). This will give your city the population density required to make the neighborhood lively.
Next, require the ground floor of these building be set aside for commercial use. On my block I have a supermarket, a pharmacy, a bakery with a sidewalk terrace, an internet café, a car repair garage, a yoga studio, a tobacconist, a couple of small shoe and clothing stores, a computer shop, a jewelry store, an optometrist, a shoe repair shop, a beauty parlor, and home appliance store. I may have missed one or two places. I can get to all of these without crossing a street. If I cross the street to the next block, I have an equal amount of small businesses to choose from.
Next, make sure you have adequate bike infrastructure and mass transit to lure people out of their cars. Throw in some dazzling parks (Turia Park is the best city park I have ever seen, and we also have an amazing beach) and you are well on your way to have a city worth living in. Good luck!
https://leftbankview.blogspot.com/201...
Or instead of reading The Geography of Nowhere, you could just come to Spain and visit my neighborhood and check out the gorgeous city of Valencia. You will soon learn everything you need to know about how to construct a vibrant, modern, and livable city.
You begin by making apartment buildings from 5 to 11 floors, depending on the surrounding area. You put this around a block with the back of the units facing into an open area away from the street (this is called a patio de manzana in Spanish). This will give your city the population density required to make the neighborhood lively.
Next, require the ground floor of these building be set aside for commercial use. On my block I have a supermarket, a pharmacy, a bakery with a sidewalk terrace, an internet café, a car repair garage, a yoga studio, a tobacconist, a couple of small shoe and clothing stores, a computer shop, a jewelry store, an optometrist, a shoe repair shop, a beauty parlor, and home appliance store. I may have missed one or two places. I can get to all of these without crossing a street. If I cross the street to the next block, I have an equal amount of small businesses to choose from.
Next, make sure you have adequate bike infrastructure and mass transit to lure people out of their cars. Throw in some dazzling parks (Turia Park is the best city park I have ever seen, and we also have an amazing beach) and you are well on your way to have a city worth living in. Good luck!
https://leftbankview.blogspot.com/201...
August 23, 2021
The book is packed with wonderful, pedestrian insights about urban life: Why are some neighbourhoods completely dormant, while others are oozing with life? How do you revive a street, and how can you tell if it's moribund (to use one of Jane's favourite words)? What causes a street to feel safe, and what doesn't? It is easiest to think of the book as a collection of observations made by Mrs. Jacobs while sitting with a cup of tea on a NYC sidewalk.
For a street to be safe, it needs life. To gain life, it needs a continues flow of people throughout the day. For that,, it needs a diversity of shops, open and alive at different times of day: Perhaps a café, bakery, popular lunch spot, postal office, pharmacy, an apparel shop, a few restaurants, and a pool bar. In order for the street to have a diversity of merchants, it needs varied prices of rent -- only chains can afford completely new builds. If everything's new, only chains will be able to afford the rent to move in (think of a strip mall, or completely new neighbourhood -- ever seen an antique store there?).
The book's filled with such observations, but they're buried in lengthy, tiring prose. The sidewalk chapters are worth reading in full, but after that I mostly read the first and last few pages of each chapter to decide whether to read the full thing. The observations have stood the test of time, but the writing has not.
For a street to be safe, it needs life. To gain life, it needs a continues flow of people throughout the day. For that,, it needs a diversity of shops, open and alive at different times of day: Perhaps a café, bakery, popular lunch spot, postal office, pharmacy, an apparel shop, a few restaurants, and a pool bar. In order for the street to have a diversity of merchants, it needs varied prices of rent -- only chains can afford completely new builds. If everything's new, only chains will be able to afford the rent to move in (think of a strip mall, or completely new neighbourhood -- ever seen an antique store there?).
The book's filled with such observations, but they're buried in lengthy, tiring prose. The sidewalk chapters are worth reading in full, but after that I mostly read the first and last few pages of each chapter to decide whether to read the full thing. The observations have stood the test of time, but the writing has not.
October 14, 2018
Evidently an important work within the author's field, this book deals with the concept of community and the nature of people, and the elements of a city that make those things possible. Many examples from both Boston and Manhattan are listed, but the majority of the cited/reference material is very antiqued and has not been updated since the author prepared to write the book in the late 1950s, and it was originally published in 1961.
Since I used to live very close to NYC, and now reside in Boston, I obviously loved the sections that references places I know and go frequently, but it made the age of the material stand out even more. Boston's North End neighborhood is specifically mentioned and because of the dated references made me question if the principles still hold true. I would love to see a revised edition that references differences between the time this book was written and now and if the principles covered here still hold true.
What prompted me to look for a book such as this, was the BU bridge and portions of Com Ave being out for nearly three weeks. I use this bridge to go from my apartment in Boston, to Cambridge every weekday for work, and was amazed at the absolute chaos that sprung from a single change in pressure on the transportation lines that fuel the city. This book covers the impact of roads on the division of spaces within the city, as well as many other things that make a community that we don't even think about.
A standout point for me was "sidewalk culture", something I never really experienced prior to moving to Boston but it something that is part of my daily life now. I have regular strangers I meet and have short dog centered conversations about as I walk Tonks, my Border Collie. I wave at neighbors who are sitting on their balconies or stoops, and local businesses keep biscuits for the canines who frequent the area with their humans. Local businesses are also a key point in this book, and are shown as the keepers of these little pockets of life.
Another standout component was the importance and controversy of public green-space. Anyone who has lived in a major city knows the importance of outdoor time and something that this book pointed out to me that I had never noticed in my own little world, was that some spaces are used and others aren't and the reasons why. We have two parks roughly equidistant from our apartment. Both are an easy walk but one is almost always empty and the other, no matter the time of day, is full of people. The "why" for this, and many other things around you that you never noticed but play an important part in your daily life, are the reasons to read this book.
I don't feel I can rate this higher than three stars though, primarily because of it being so outdated. Women are quoted as saying their husbands do not give them permission to go certain places, a shopkeeper is thought to not introduce a professional because it was outside his social class, various comments on race and inequality, etc. While I loved the "story" format of much of the book, a quick edit could have made a more concise and easier to follow point-by-point work on a very interesting and often overlooked topic.
Since I used to live very close to NYC, and now reside in Boston, I obviously loved the sections that references places I know and go frequently, but it made the age of the material stand out even more. Boston's North End neighborhood is specifically mentioned and because of the dated references made me question if the principles still hold true. I would love to see a revised edition that references differences between the time this book was written and now and if the principles covered here still hold true.
"Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers."
What prompted me to look for a book such as this, was the BU bridge and portions of Com Ave being out for nearly three weeks. I use this bridge to go from my apartment in Boston, to Cambridge every weekday for work, and was amazed at the absolute chaos that sprung from a single change in pressure on the transportation lines that fuel the city. This book covers the impact of roads on the division of spaces within the city, as well as many other things that make a community that we don't even think about.
A standout point for me was "sidewalk culture", something I never really experienced prior to moving to Boston but it something that is part of my daily life now. I have regular strangers I meet and have short dog centered conversations about as I walk Tonks, my Border Collie. I wave at neighbors who are sitting on their balconies or stoops, and local businesses keep biscuits for the canines who frequent the area with their humans. Local businesses are also a key point in this book, and are shown as the keepers of these little pockets of life.
"The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves."
Another standout component was the importance and controversy of public green-space. Anyone who has lived in a major city knows the importance of outdoor time and something that this book pointed out to me that I had never noticed in my own little world, was that some spaces are used and others aren't and the reasons why. We have two parks roughly equidistant from our apartment. Both are an easy walk but one is almost always empty and the other, no matter the time of day, is full of people. The "why" for this, and many other things around you that you never noticed but play an important part in your daily life, are the reasons to read this book.
I don't feel I can rate this higher than three stars though, primarily because of it being so outdated. Women are quoted as saying their husbands do not give them permission to go certain places, a shopkeeper is thought to not introduce a professional because it was outside his social class, various comments on race and inequality, etc. While I loved the "story" format of much of the book, a quick edit could have made a more concise and easier to follow point-by-point work on a very interesting and often overlooked topic.
November 22, 2009
This took me a while to read because it was easy to put down. This book is famous for being one of the first sources of critique of American city planning, and many of her arguments seem to hold water even today. This said, I constantly asked myself "where is the science?" while reading this. I wonder if it had been published in this decade, would she be allowed to draw so many conclusions based almost entirely on personal observation and opinion. My assessment of this book mirrors my judgment of the urban planning discipline in general. I am not very familiar with the more rigorous side of urban planning, but my impression is that it is wrought with stylistic trends that gain their popularity from some source other than studies which prove that one decision is actually better than any other.
July 25, 2017
It is easy to write Jacobs off as a utopian, but this book, derived from a women's-eye view of living in New York's Greenwich Village in the late 1950s gives us a great sense of what the city could be and her recurrent struggles with and voer Robert Moses's attempts to redesign NYC in the 1960s privide us with a model of urban struggle and defencs of urban space. It remains a blistering critique of the impacts of urban design, of the inadequacies of design-from-the-top, and a powerful case of the usefulness of ethnographic participant observation - not that she set out to be an ethnographer, but to be a polticial advocate from her locality. Superb.
September 15, 2022
a common sense approach towards urbanism, super prescient for its time as basically everything is still applicable
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March 6, 2024біблія урбаністики. так єс сі, книга про Сполучені Штати середини минулого сторіччя, але описані авторкою речі універсальні й працюють донині. і так, я знаю, що це звучить як довбане кліше, але що поробиш 🤷♂️
штука в тому, що Джейн Джейкобс не була ані архітекторкою, ані політикинею. вона просто навчилась доволі вправно користуватись очима. реально, ця жінка вклала всі бали життєвого досвіду в perception, бо її спостереження ламають свідомість. наприклад, чи ви коли-небудь задумувались, що:
- змішувати будівлі різного типу призначення, як то житлові й муніципальні, на одній вулиці — не просто нормально, а ще й правильно (звісно, якщо твій мер хоче, аби у твоєму мікрорайоні вирувало життя)
- невеличкі квартали, що дозволяють нишпорити провулками — запорука вітальності району, ніхто не любить обходити довжелезні будинки та блукати вздовж мудацьких парканів
- хоч це й може здатися нелогічним, але в центрах міст та на вузьких вуличках треба заборонити цивільні легковушки й полишити виключно вантажівки + таксі, а світлофори варто налаштувати таким чином, щоб не було “зелених коридорів” і водіям доводилось зупинятись на КОЖНОМУ з перехресть; чим більше водійської бісячки, тим ймовірніше, що наступного разу вони оберуть метро
- проблема того, що твій спальник ввечері вимираєі просинається мафія в недостатній кількості маленьких бізнесів навколо. чому? бо чим більше у твоєму районі людей із різним графіком, тим безпечніше там буде жити
- той дідусь, що постійно сидить на лавці під падіком, робить для безпеки твого будинку більше, ніж вся місцева поліція
- свідомість починається з тебе, тому не сци сказати бешкетнику, що воно бешкетує
- одна-єдина вкручена в ліхтар лампочка зменшує рівень вуличної злочинності на скількись-то там відсотків (статистика з книжки нерелевантна, бо стосується Америки 50-х, але ідея зрозуміла)
- типова забудова — смертний гріх і дорога в пекло, просто закиньте будь-яку розбещену Рейтарською персону в ЖК Патріотика і запитайте (це київський інсайд, вибачте)
- Ле Корбюзьє, звісно, дуже важливий дядько, але його бачення хайтекових спальників як ідеального житла майбутнього — срака, він просто вигадав вертикальні гетто, бо планував усереднені міста для усереднених потреб, а воно так не працює: крім архітектурних питань, є ще ціла купа змінних, які треба враховувати — потік гостей, потік мешканців, середній дохід мешканців, наявність бізнесів, наявність рекреацій, людський трафік, транспортна завантаженість тощо
- не треба боятись вайбера, бо ОСББ — то найкраща система самоврядування (звісно, якщо голові ОСББ не чхати на ОСББ)
- в книзі ще більше ніби-то очевидних фактів, про які не дуже часто міркуєш, а було б варто
в передмові Джейн Джейкобс пише, що її тексту ілюстрації не потрібні. просто наступного разу як будете йти вулицею — дивіться навкруги, помітите багато цікавого. от же ж розумака 🖤
штука в тому, що Джейн Джейкобс не була ані архітекторкою, ані політикинею. вона просто навчилась доволі вправно користуватись очима. реально, ця жінка вклала всі бали життєвого досвіду в perception, бо її спостереження ламають свідомість. наприклад, чи ви коли-небудь задумувались, що:
- змішувати будівлі різного типу призначення, як то житлові й муніципальні, на одній вулиці — не просто нормально, а ще й правильно (звісно, якщо твій мер хоче, аби у твоєму мікрорайоні вирувало життя)
- невеличкі квартали, що дозволяють нишпорити провулками — запорука вітальності району, ніхто не любить обходити довжелезні будинки та блукати вздовж мудацьких парканів
- хоч це й може здатися нелогічним, але в центрах міст та на вузьких вуличках треба заборонити цивільні легковушки й полишити виключно вантажівки + таксі, а світлофори варто налаштувати таким чином, щоб не було “зелених коридорів” і водіям доводилось зупинятись на КОЖНОМУ з перехресть; чим більше водійської бісячки, тим ймовірніше, що наступного разу вони оберуть метро
- проблема того, що твій спальник ввечері вимирає
- той дідусь, що постійно сидить на лавці під падіком, робить для безпеки твого будинку більше, ніж вся місцева поліція
- свідомість починається з тебе, тому не сци сказати бешкетнику, що воно бешкетує
- одна-єдина вкручена в ліхтар лампочка зменшує рівень вуличної злочинності на скількись-то там відсотків (статистика з книжки нерелевантна, бо стосується Америки 50-х, але ідея зрозуміла)
- типова забудова — смертний гріх і дорога в пекло, просто закиньте будь-яку розбещену Рейтарською персону в ЖК Патріотика і запитайте (це київський інсайд, вибачте)
- Ле Корбюзьє, звісно, дуже важливий дядько, але його бачення хайтекових спальників як ідеального житла майбутнього — срака, він просто вигадав вертикальні гетто, бо планував усереднені міста для усереднених потреб, а воно так не працює: крім архітектурних питань, є ще ціла купа змінних, які треба враховувати — потік гостей, потік мешканців, середній дохід мешканців, наявність бізнесів, наявність рекреацій, людський трафік, транспортна завантаженість тощо
- не треба боятись вайбера, бо ОСББ — то найкраща система самоврядування (звісно, якщо голові ОСББ не чхати на ОСББ)
- в книзі ще більше ніби-то очевидних фактів, про які не дуже часто міркуєш, а було б варто
в передмові Джейн Джейкобс пише, що її тексту ілюстрації не потрібні. просто наступного разу як будете йти вулицею — дивіться навкруги, помітите багато цікавого. от же ж розумака 🖤
November 17, 2023
I now understand why Jane Jacobs is a legend in the urban planning space.
Jacobs thoroughly outlines what she believes to the problem in cities nowadays and presents a beautiful vision of what cities should look like. She argues for diversity and liveliness which make cities sustainable, interesting, and safe. This sharply contrasts the dull, segregated layouts of many North American suburbs. It is fascinating that this book was written in the 1960s yet feels so relevant and fresh. Many of the problems facing planners in the past still persist today. I also really enjoyed Jacobs conversational and witty writing style; it made the book an easy read.
I did find the book a bit long, and I preferred the first half over the second. The second half became a bit more technical as to Jacobs different proposal on how to address common problems in planning, such as unslumming or city governing. I found it a bit hard to understand though it may be because this is my first book on urban planning. I also found Jacob's vision for a successful city to be quite unrealistic. Though each aspect of her solutions made sense, I would find it so impossibly difficult to implement. At least she addresses how complex of a problem it is to build a city in the last chapter. Good thing I'm not an urban planner! ;)
I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone who has an urban planning itch to scratch and willing to commit to a nearly 500 page read. Watch as Jane Jacobs masterfully changes how you view cities.
Jacobs thoroughly outlines what she believes to the problem in cities nowadays and presents a beautiful vision of what cities should look like. She argues for diversity and liveliness which make cities sustainable, interesting, and safe. This sharply contrasts the dull, segregated layouts of many North American suburbs. It is fascinating that this book was written in the 1960s yet feels so relevant and fresh. Many of the problems facing planners in the past still persist today. I also really enjoyed Jacobs conversational and witty writing style; it made the book an easy read.
I did find the book a bit long, and I preferred the first half over the second. The second half became a bit more technical as to Jacobs different proposal on how to address common problems in planning, such as unslumming or city governing. I found it a bit hard to understand though it may be because this is my first book on urban planning. I also found Jacob's vision for a successful city to be quite unrealistic. Though each aspect of her solutions made sense, I would find it so impossibly difficult to implement. At least she addresses how complex of a problem it is to build a city in the last chapter. Good thing I'm not an urban planner! ;)
I loved this book and would recommend it to anyone who has an urban planning itch to scratch and willing to commit to a nearly 500 page read. Watch as Jane Jacobs masterfully changes how you view cities.
October 9, 2023
this was quite dense and took me forever to finish. its an older text but is truly timeless and foundational to the field of urban planning. it’s crazy how so many of the patterns, issues, etc that jacobs noticed in her time have cycled and endured with time.
January 25, 2009
Favorite passages:
To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: The distrct must serve more than one purpose (preferably more than two), the blocks must be short, the buildings must vary in age and condition, and the population must be dense.
Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, which used to be considered by many critics one of the most beautiful of American avenues (it was, in those days, essentially a suburban avenue of large, fine houses with large, fine grounds), has now been excoriated, with justice… as one of the ugliest and most disorganized of city streets. In converting to outright urban use, Euclid Avenue has converted to homogeneity: office buildings again, and again a chaos of shouted, but superficial, differences. (p. 226)
Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves. Wherever people are thinly settled, rather than densely concentrated, or wherever diverse uses occur infrequently, any specific attraction does cause traffic congestion… this is tolerable where the population is thinly spread. It becomes an intolerable condition, destructive of all other values and all other aspects of convenience, where populations are heavy or continuous. (p. 230)
… Credit-blacklist maps are identical, both in conception and in most results, with municipal slum-clearance maps. And municipal slum-clearance maps are regarded as responsible devices, used for responsible purposes - among their purposes is, in fact, that of warning lenders not to invest here… Credit-blacklist maps, like slum-clearance maps, are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies. (p. 300)
… there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art… we need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. (p. 372)
What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? What if we are prevented from catalyzing workable and vital cities because the practical steps needed to do so are in conflict with the practical steps demanded by erosion?… In that case we Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millenia: What is the purpose of life? For us, theanswer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles. (p. 370)
To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: The distrct must serve more than one purpose (preferably more than two), the blocks must be short, the buildings must vary in age and condition, and the population must be dense.
Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, which used to be considered by many critics one of the most beautiful of American avenues (it was, in those days, essentially a suburban avenue of large, fine houses with large, fine grounds), has now been excoriated, with justice… as one of the ugliest and most disorganized of city streets. In converting to outright urban use, Euclid Avenue has converted to homogeneity: office buildings again, and again a chaos of shouted, but superficial, differences. (p. 226)
Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves. Wherever people are thinly settled, rather than densely concentrated, or wherever diverse uses occur infrequently, any specific attraction does cause traffic congestion… this is tolerable where the population is thinly spread. It becomes an intolerable condition, destructive of all other values and all other aspects of convenience, where populations are heavy or continuous. (p. 230)
… Credit-blacklist maps are identical, both in conception and in most results, with municipal slum-clearance maps. And municipal slum-clearance maps are regarded as responsible devices, used for responsible purposes - among their purposes is, in fact, that of warning lenders not to invest here… Credit-blacklist maps, like slum-clearance maps, are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies. (p. 300)
… there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art… we need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. (p. 372)
What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? What if we are prevented from catalyzing workable and vital cities because the practical steps needed to do so are in conflict with the practical steps demanded by erosion?… In that case we Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millenia: What is the purpose of life? For us, theanswer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles. (p. 370)
October 24, 2022
[read as part of a Reboot book club]
This book was truly eye-opening. Jacobs' way of writing, like Sontag or Graeber, is so confidently defiant of a perceived consensus or status quo that you can't help but agree with her every step of the way. You will finish this book as a staunch opponent of the Garden / Radiant City philosophy and utterly contemptuous of urban planning as a discipline (at least, as it stood in the 1960s). Note that this is an enormous book, and it took me a couple months aided by a book club to get through all of it. Buy it, put it on your bookshelf, and read a chapter or two every time you step out into a new part of a city. :)
Where I suspect Jacobs' analysis is lacking, particularly when applied to cities of our time, is the role of global capital in re-shaping the face of the urban landscape. Urban planners and bureaucrats are the main target of her critique; while developers are certainly mentioned in the book, I felt as if she didn't contend enough with the sheer force of capital to remake cities in its image. Jacobs calls cities problems of organized complexity, likening them to complex biological systems like cells and organs. True, but they also are engines of capital. Policy decisions at the local level aren't just the results of the whims of urban planners and bureaucrats like Robert Moses - they are driven by the demands of multinational real estate development firms, shrinking tax bases, the race to the bottom for tech companies to build headquarters in one city over another. This -1 star is not really a critique of Jacobs approach - it's more of my own unrealistic expectation that this book would have given me all the tools I needed to understand today's cities, in addition to those of Jacobs' time.
This book was truly eye-opening. Jacobs' way of writing, like Sontag or Graeber, is so confidently defiant of a perceived consensus or status quo that you can't help but agree with her every step of the way. You will finish this book as a staunch opponent of the Garden / Radiant City philosophy and utterly contemptuous of urban planning as a discipline (at least, as it stood in the 1960s). Note that this is an enormous book, and it took me a couple months aided by a book club to get through all of it. Buy it, put it on your bookshelf, and read a chapter or two every time you step out into a new part of a city. :)
Where I suspect Jacobs' analysis is lacking, particularly when applied to cities of our time, is the role of global capital in re-shaping the face of the urban landscape. Urban planners and bureaucrats are the main target of her critique; while developers are certainly mentioned in the book, I felt as if she didn't contend enough with the sheer force of capital to remake cities in its image. Jacobs calls cities problems of organized complexity, likening them to complex biological systems like cells and organs. True, but they also are engines of capital. Policy decisions at the local level aren't just the results of the whims of urban planners and bureaucrats like Robert Moses - they are driven by the demands of multinational real estate development firms, shrinking tax bases, the race to the bottom for tech companies to build headquarters in one city over another. This -1 star is not really a critique of Jacobs approach - it's more of my own unrealistic expectation that this book would have given me all the tools I needed to understand today's cities, in addition to those of Jacobs' time.
February 27, 2018
I don't use the term "tour de force" often, but...
This is an incredible book. Written in 1961, it dissects the urban planning trends of the first half of the 20th century, and then proceeds to convincingly tear them to shreds. Rather than rely on abstract aesthetic principles concocted on a draft board, Jacobs starts from first principles and street-level, observational data, constructing a revolutionary view of how cities work and what makes them great -- liveliness, activity, opportunity, diversity. And she shows using simple, relatable examples from her own experience how the design of cities -- the streets, sidewalks, parks, buildings, monuments, districts, etc. -- conspires to create or destroy these things.
Jacobs identifies four key requirements for a successful City district: mixed primary uses, short blocks, varied building ages, and population density.
This book explains many phenomena I've observed myself and wondered about, like why San Francisco's Civic Center is the way it is and what makes it such a miserable ghost town. Or why certain cities have such life to them. I feel like my eyes have been opened to the theoretical underpinnings of much of what's going on around me.
It's the kind of book which can only be written once, since the point of view is so new and refreshing. That Jacobs does it with such a fully realized theory, in such a well structured and written book, is awe inspiring.
This is an incredible book. Written in 1961, it dissects the urban planning trends of the first half of the 20th century, and then proceeds to convincingly tear them to shreds. Rather than rely on abstract aesthetic principles concocted on a draft board, Jacobs starts from first principles and street-level, observational data, constructing a revolutionary view of how cities work and what makes them great -- liveliness, activity, opportunity, diversity. And she shows using simple, relatable examples from her own experience how the design of cities -- the streets, sidewalks, parks, buildings, monuments, districts, etc. -- conspires to create or destroy these things.
Jacobs identifies four key requirements for a successful City district: mixed primary uses, short blocks, varied building ages, and population density.
This book explains many phenomena I've observed myself and wondered about, like why San Francisco's Civic Center is the way it is and what makes it such a miserable ghost town. Or why certain cities have such life to them. I feel like my eyes have been opened to the theoretical underpinnings of much of what's going on around me.
It's the kind of book which can only be written once, since the point of view is so new and refreshing. That Jacobs does it with such a fully realized theory, in such a well structured and written book, is awe inspiring.
July 19, 2019
Jane Jacobs is brilliant. Her insights on urban planning are both practical and exciting.
January 1, 2009
My friend Todd’s finishing up his PhD in Urban Planning at Louisville this year, and he’s been telling me since he started the program that I should read this book, especially since I live in New York City.
I bought the book awhile ago, but never got around to reading it; it just didn’t seem to be my kind of thing. “It’s more your thing than mine,” Todd said. I didn’t know what he meant until I decided to incorporate it into a freshman orientation class I teach on the history and mystery of New York City. After reading it, I’d say that anyone living in New York City (or any other major metropolitan area, “Great American City” in Jacobs’ words) should not just read but ingest it.
The introduction states her thesis, which is essentially that traditional urban planners (as of 1961, the original date of publication, but most of her points about NYC planners remain valid today), instead of addressing cities on their own terms with their own distinctly, well, “city” relationships and problems, try to make them fit into smaller-town prototypes. This, she argues, is by nature destined for failure.
She divides the book into four sections. The first section, The Peculiar Nature of Cities, lays out what makes cities function, specifically:
* Interrelated primary functions – In other words, the reasons people are commingling on the streets, and how those functions work off of each other. She uses a beautiful passage on pp50-54 to describe the “ballet of Hudson Street,” where through the course of every day the strete remains alive with people putting out the trash, kids going to school, local vendors setting up shop, mothers walking their babies, kids acting crazy on the streets after school, night workers stopping by the bodegas to pick up their lunch, the local taverns picking up the night crowds, lots between and after.
* Limited privacy – Her argument is essentially that people don’t want to have long, drawn-out interractions with strangers, but they want to feel safe that if they need help they’ll receive it.
* Uses of sidewalks – She devotes three chapters to the way that sidewalks socialize (or don’t socialize) people, and how decreased sidewalk usage is directly related to reduced street safety.
* Uses of parks – She’s not big on them, at least in and of themselves, as she sees many city planners following the “Garden City” plan of simply producing open green spaces on the assumption that people naturally flock to them to get away from the streets. They often achieve the opposite of their intention, she argues, as the primary group to flock to them are criminals and the indigent if the parks are simply put in and left alone.
* Uses of neighborhoods – I thought this was the best chapter of the section. She dismisses forthright the notion of neighborhoods as self-sufficient within a city, and sets out the hierarchy of neighborhood-district-city that, if connected, keeps neighborhoods functional and not simply warring “turfs.”
The second section, and in her words the most important, The Conditions for City Diversity, points out specific necessities to maintain diversity. I must state here that by diversity, she doesn’t necessarily mean cultural diversity (although that contributes to the diversity she speaks of) but rather a more universal diversity, including functional, economic, educational, cultural, and other forms. These conditions include:
* Mixed primary uses – By “primary” she means the reasons a street, block, building, or other landmark is a destination rather than simply a place to pass through; these include work, residence, education, entertainment, and recreation. The needs for there to be a variety of primary uses goes back to her earlier statement on the need for interrelated activity to keep a street/block/neighborhood alive.
* Small blocks – This is a relatively short and succinct point, essentially that the longer a block is, the less spontaneous traffic it will have, and thus the less interactivity of uses.
* Aged buildings – This to me was one of the most elucidating chapters of the entire book. My first thought while reading was that she would address the historic and aesthetic value of older buildings; instead, she spends the majority of this chapter dealing with their role in generating economic diversity. The argument is simple, actually – older buildings are the only lodging that smaller, riskier, and/or newer enterprises can afford, so essentially they are the incubators of small business, which in turn stimulates economic diversity. She is positively prophetic in her use of Brooklyn as a prime example on pp196-198; she writes – in 1961, mind you – of Brooklyn’s potential as an incubator of small industry with its surfeit of huge industrial buildings. Living and running my business out of a factory loft in Bushwick with a vibrant, hipster-enterprise-filled community all around me, I can vouch for the wisdom of this assessment.
* Concentration of population – Here is her argument, which has become a pretty standard one in liberal urban planning circles, against suburban sprawl. One thing she makes clear early – by concentration (and density) she doesn’t mean overcrowding. In fact, she argues, overcrowding usually occurs when the conditions for diversity aren’t met, and additionally the most dangerous areas of most cities are the ones with densities low enough that there is little community surveillance.
In the third section, Forces of Decline and Regeneration, Jacobs focuses her energy on the forces that encourage, sustain, defer, and/or destroy diversity and vitality in a city:
* The first force for decline in a city or a neighborhood is the most ironic – a neighborhood made successful by its diversity and dynamism self-destructs by allowing one or two industries or purposes dominate it. She mentions banks, insurance companies, and high-end office buildings as prominent diversity destroyers, as they are economically conservative, investing usually only in established successes, and that they have the financial resources to supplant any other industries in the near vicinity. Once again I’ll use my beloved Brooklyn as an example: Williamsburg, over the last 5-7 years, has found itself an apex of hipster, artistic, and industrial uses; the city, in response to the increased desirability of the area for residential yuppie traffic and the attendant increase in financial resources, has rezoned both Williamsburg and the riverfront-area Greenpoint to encourage high-rise and condominium construction. Already, every inch of Greenpoint’s riverfront has been bought and sold, never to be used by anyone but the proprietors and renters. The waterfront is boarded up invisible from land, and with the housing market the way it is I haven’t seen many lights on in the buildings that have been put up.
* Another negative force is what Jacobs terms “border vacuums,” areas in cities and neighborhoods where a buffer zone forms between different uses and/or demographic groups. These areas, she states, tend to form “gray zones” where few people from either side go, and end up the most dangerous places in the area. She includes railroad tracks, waterfronts, campus edges, expressways, parking lots, and large parks as obvious physical barriers, but emphasizes that these areas can form anywhere there is little overlap in activity between the groups of people who occupy and/or work there. Her solution is to turn borders into what she dubs seams, “a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together.” To offset the negative Williamsburg-Greenpoint example I used in the last point, I’ll bring up a successful “seam” area on the Brooklyn waterfront, the pier off Owl’s Head Park. When I lived in Sunset Park I would run down there frequently, and I found there the closest approximation of the Old New York I imagined before moving here – skaters ramping, fishermen fishing, teenagers flirting, runners running, parents strolling, and all of this with freighters meandering by on the water and the Verrazano Bridge in the distance; a complete diversity of uses, with each peacefully sharing a relatively small space.
I couldn't finish this review on GoodReads as it's over the character limit - if you want the rest, you can go to my blog at:
http://johnproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/...
I bought the book awhile ago, but never got around to reading it; it just didn’t seem to be my kind of thing. “It’s more your thing than mine,” Todd said. I didn’t know what he meant until I decided to incorporate it into a freshman orientation class I teach on the history and mystery of New York City. After reading it, I’d say that anyone living in New York City (or any other major metropolitan area, “Great American City” in Jacobs’ words) should not just read but ingest it.
The introduction states her thesis, which is essentially that traditional urban planners (as of 1961, the original date of publication, but most of her points about NYC planners remain valid today), instead of addressing cities on their own terms with their own distinctly, well, “city” relationships and problems, try to make them fit into smaller-town prototypes. This, she argues, is by nature destined for failure.
She divides the book into four sections. The first section, The Peculiar Nature of Cities, lays out what makes cities function, specifically:
* Interrelated primary functions – In other words, the reasons people are commingling on the streets, and how those functions work off of each other. She uses a beautiful passage on pp50-54 to describe the “ballet of Hudson Street,” where through the course of every day the strete remains alive with people putting out the trash, kids going to school, local vendors setting up shop, mothers walking their babies, kids acting crazy on the streets after school, night workers stopping by the bodegas to pick up their lunch, the local taverns picking up the night crowds, lots between and after.
* Limited privacy – Her argument is essentially that people don’t want to have long, drawn-out interractions with strangers, but they want to feel safe that if they need help they’ll receive it.
* Uses of sidewalks – She devotes three chapters to the way that sidewalks socialize (or don’t socialize) people, and how decreased sidewalk usage is directly related to reduced street safety.
* Uses of parks – She’s not big on them, at least in and of themselves, as she sees many city planners following the “Garden City” plan of simply producing open green spaces on the assumption that people naturally flock to them to get away from the streets. They often achieve the opposite of their intention, she argues, as the primary group to flock to them are criminals and the indigent if the parks are simply put in and left alone.
* Uses of neighborhoods – I thought this was the best chapter of the section. She dismisses forthright the notion of neighborhoods as self-sufficient within a city, and sets out the hierarchy of neighborhood-district-city that, if connected, keeps neighborhoods functional and not simply warring “turfs.”
The second section, and in her words the most important, The Conditions for City Diversity, points out specific necessities to maintain diversity. I must state here that by diversity, she doesn’t necessarily mean cultural diversity (although that contributes to the diversity she speaks of) but rather a more universal diversity, including functional, economic, educational, cultural, and other forms. These conditions include:
* Mixed primary uses – By “primary” she means the reasons a street, block, building, or other landmark is a destination rather than simply a place to pass through; these include work, residence, education, entertainment, and recreation. The needs for there to be a variety of primary uses goes back to her earlier statement on the need for interrelated activity to keep a street/block/neighborhood alive.
* Small blocks – This is a relatively short and succinct point, essentially that the longer a block is, the less spontaneous traffic it will have, and thus the less interactivity of uses.
* Aged buildings – This to me was one of the most elucidating chapters of the entire book. My first thought while reading was that she would address the historic and aesthetic value of older buildings; instead, she spends the majority of this chapter dealing with their role in generating economic diversity. The argument is simple, actually – older buildings are the only lodging that smaller, riskier, and/or newer enterprises can afford, so essentially they are the incubators of small business, which in turn stimulates economic diversity. She is positively prophetic in her use of Brooklyn as a prime example on pp196-198; she writes – in 1961, mind you – of Brooklyn’s potential as an incubator of small industry with its surfeit of huge industrial buildings. Living and running my business out of a factory loft in Bushwick with a vibrant, hipster-enterprise-filled community all around me, I can vouch for the wisdom of this assessment.
* Concentration of population – Here is her argument, which has become a pretty standard one in liberal urban planning circles, against suburban sprawl. One thing she makes clear early – by concentration (and density) she doesn’t mean overcrowding. In fact, she argues, overcrowding usually occurs when the conditions for diversity aren’t met, and additionally the most dangerous areas of most cities are the ones with densities low enough that there is little community surveillance.
In the third section, Forces of Decline and Regeneration, Jacobs focuses her energy on the forces that encourage, sustain, defer, and/or destroy diversity and vitality in a city:
* The first force for decline in a city or a neighborhood is the most ironic – a neighborhood made successful by its diversity and dynamism self-destructs by allowing one or two industries or purposes dominate it. She mentions banks, insurance companies, and high-end office buildings as prominent diversity destroyers, as they are economically conservative, investing usually only in established successes, and that they have the financial resources to supplant any other industries in the near vicinity. Once again I’ll use my beloved Brooklyn as an example: Williamsburg, over the last 5-7 years, has found itself an apex of hipster, artistic, and industrial uses; the city, in response to the increased desirability of the area for residential yuppie traffic and the attendant increase in financial resources, has rezoned both Williamsburg and the riverfront-area Greenpoint to encourage high-rise and condominium construction. Already, every inch of Greenpoint’s riverfront has been bought and sold, never to be used by anyone but the proprietors and renters. The waterfront is boarded up invisible from land, and with the housing market the way it is I haven’t seen many lights on in the buildings that have been put up.
* Another negative force is what Jacobs terms “border vacuums,” areas in cities and neighborhoods where a buffer zone forms between different uses and/or demographic groups. These areas, she states, tend to form “gray zones” where few people from either side go, and end up the most dangerous places in the area. She includes railroad tracks, waterfronts, campus edges, expressways, parking lots, and large parks as obvious physical barriers, but emphasizes that these areas can form anywhere there is little overlap in activity between the groups of people who occupy and/or work there. Her solution is to turn borders into what she dubs seams, “a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together.” To offset the negative Williamsburg-Greenpoint example I used in the last point, I’ll bring up a successful “seam” area on the Brooklyn waterfront, the pier off Owl’s Head Park. When I lived in Sunset Park I would run down there frequently, and I found there the closest approximation of the Old New York I imagined before moving here – skaters ramping, fishermen fishing, teenagers flirting, runners running, parents strolling, and all of this with freighters meandering by on the water and the Verrazano Bridge in the distance; a complete diversity of uses, with each peacefully sharing a relatively small space.
I couldn't finish this review on GoodReads as it's over the character limit - if you want the rest, you can go to my blog at:
http://johnproc.blogspot.com/2008/06/...
November 30, 2016
I was prompted to read this book, which had sat on my shelf for a little while, by its inclusion in an essay reading list. As I needed to mark the essays, it was time to read the thing. I enjoyed the majority of it, although naturally some chapters have aged better than others. That in itself is interesting, though, and at times sad. Jacobs writes to challenge the utopian, modernist, grand-scale, top-down, social engineering approach to planning that prevailed (I over-generalise) between the early 20th century and the late 1970s in the Western world. She published this book in 1961, when critique of the dominant approach (or paradigm, if you can stomach the word) was starting to gain ground. It would be the 1980s that staked utopian planning through the heart and buried it, though. Unfortunately, the subtle, community-scale suggestions put forth by Jane Jacobs were not then adopted. Instead, planning reacted against former interventionism with a hands-off presumption that the market knew best. Europe never took this as far as the US, but has ended up with a legacy of urban problems that the market has somehow failed to magically fix. This was of course tangled up with wider political trends, the fall of communism, etc. One thing that Jacobs never mentions is that planning has always been a battleground for political ideology. The oppositional planning vs market narrative that still prevails now is refreshingly lacking.
Anyway, Jacobs book is dense with ideas and thoughtful analysis that I won’t attempt to fully summarise. Even a single chapter isn’t readily reducible to simple maxims (although naturally my students did just that, with varying levels of success). Jacobs repeatedly points out that all characteristics of cities are relative; for a district to become vital and diverse, density needs to be high-ish, but not too high, and the level will vary depending on many other factors. Quite late in the book, Jacobs notes that urban problems involve ‘organised complexity’, meaning that multiple variables are at play and each interacts with each of the others. Although she doesn’t use the terminology of complexity theory, as it didn’t really exist in 1961, she is in some ways prefiguring a much more recent development in planning literature. This considers emergent effects, based on many interactions, social learning, and no automatic rationality assumption. Such thinking has yet to diffuse into planning practise, though, as far as I know. Probably because agent-based modelling of complex urban problems remains computationally intensive and economics has taken over the social sciences. To economists, planning is just a useless block to development, a system that should probably be replaced by taxation of social costs. ...OK, this review is rapidly turning into a planning rant, for which I apologise.
The detailed discussion of urban diversity is perhaps the most striking element of the book and still has considerable relevance. Probably more so in the US, though. The chapters on ‘unslumming’ are depressing for how little seems to have been learned in the intervening 53 years. Large-scale housing projects these days tend towards demolishing 1960s tower blocks and moving their inhabitants, and thus pockets of poverty, elsewhere. Jacobs’ savaging of the mere concept of public housing is to my mind too extreme, as her proposed replacement for it is essentially UK housing benefit. As well as being challenging to administer, housing benefit has to rise with rents. In a situation of housing shortage, it is probably more effective for the public sector to also supplement private markets by developing housing. I was bitterly amused by one of the problems she states that slums need to overcome - blacklisting (now known as redlining) by mortgage lenders. These days, you could probably observe more damage to the US urban fabric from over-lending than lack thereof.
I could write a full-blown essay on ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, but technically planning isn’t my research area so I won’t. This book remains a fascinating and important work on urban policy, in some ways ahead of its time, in other ways redolent of a future that planning never realised. It is written in a lucid, very readable style which reminded me of Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World For the 21st Century. In fact, Kunstler made very similar points about density and diversity 35 years later. The careful and balanced tone of Jacobs' arguments counterbalances the nature of her supporting evidence, which is overwhelmingly anecdotal. But as she sensibly comments, 'A numerical answer means less than a functional answer'. That should be the new motto of the social sciences.
Anyway, Jacobs book is dense with ideas and thoughtful analysis that I won’t attempt to fully summarise. Even a single chapter isn’t readily reducible to simple maxims (although naturally my students did just that, with varying levels of success). Jacobs repeatedly points out that all characteristics of cities are relative; for a district to become vital and diverse, density needs to be high-ish, but not too high, and the level will vary depending on many other factors. Quite late in the book, Jacobs notes that urban problems involve ‘organised complexity’, meaning that multiple variables are at play and each interacts with each of the others. Although she doesn’t use the terminology of complexity theory, as it didn’t really exist in 1961, she is in some ways prefiguring a much more recent development in planning literature. This considers emergent effects, based on many interactions, social learning, and no automatic rationality assumption. Such thinking has yet to diffuse into planning practise, though, as far as I know. Probably because agent-based modelling of complex urban problems remains computationally intensive and economics has taken over the social sciences. To economists, planning is just a useless block to development, a system that should probably be replaced by taxation of social costs. ...OK, this review is rapidly turning into a planning rant, for which I apologise.
The detailed discussion of urban diversity is perhaps the most striking element of the book and still has considerable relevance. Probably more so in the US, though. The chapters on ‘unslumming’ are depressing for how little seems to have been learned in the intervening 53 years. Large-scale housing projects these days tend towards demolishing 1960s tower blocks and moving their inhabitants, and thus pockets of poverty, elsewhere. Jacobs’ savaging of the mere concept of public housing is to my mind too extreme, as her proposed replacement for it is essentially UK housing benefit. As well as being challenging to administer, housing benefit has to rise with rents. In a situation of housing shortage, it is probably more effective for the public sector to also supplement private markets by developing housing. I was bitterly amused by one of the problems she states that slums need to overcome - blacklisting (now known as redlining) by mortgage lenders. These days, you could probably observe more damage to the US urban fabric from over-lending than lack thereof.
I could write a full-blown essay on ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, but technically planning isn’t my research area so I won’t. This book remains a fascinating and important work on urban policy, in some ways ahead of its time, in other ways redolent of a future that planning never realised. It is written in a lucid, very readable style which reminded me of Home from Nowhere: Remaking Our Everyday World For the 21st Century. In fact, Kunstler made very similar points about density and diversity 35 years later. The careful and balanced tone of Jacobs' arguments counterbalances the nature of her supporting evidence, which is overwhelmingly anecdotal. But as she sensibly comments, 'A numerical answer means less than a functional answer'. That should be the new motto of the social sciences.
July 19, 2014
I've never read anything about city planning or urban studies before, so this was all quite new to me. Jacobs creates a vivid, wide ranging critique of the dominant forms of city planning, which are driven as she compellingly points out, by stupidly reactionary, romantic notions about how people should be made to live. I'd never really thought in a concerted way before about how things like sidewalk width, the ages of buildings, the the location of public buildings etc. would effect how people move, interact and live within a city. Her method of simple, direct observation reveals an entire strata around us which shapes our lives, our culture and our municipal policies, usually without much notice on our part. Whenever I drive around the not-quite-great American city I live in, I now find myself trying to determine if the blocks are too long, if the road-bed is too wide, and noticing how the space around most of the parks is conspicuously empty and dead. And as someone who grew up surrounded by belligerently provincial mid-westerners, it's really refreshing to have someone vehemently explain how and why large cities are not only a valid kind of place to live, but can actually be essential. I'd highly recommend this, especially to anyone who like me, is a total newbie when it comes to urbanism.
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October 21, 2008I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Especially to anyone who's interested in the ways in which cities operate, but also to pretty much anyone else. Ms. Jacobs was hella prescient in her emphasis on cityspace needing to be used more than produced, and goes about demonstrating the failures of modernist planning and drawing a line towards a new method of development in which the city-dweller takes primacy. Also, it warns about the dangers of gentrification years before anyone else was thinking about it, predicts the decline of cities with the building of large expressways, and on and on. Wow!
November 24, 2018
"Why have cities not, long since, been identified, understood and treated as problems of organized complexity?"
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves."
"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves."
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