The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning.... [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book’s arguments.” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs’s tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable.
Stats for nerds
61recommend
104mentions
87people
2008–2026years
68% recommend30% neutral2% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- See also Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
- Squares don’t create activity — activity creates squares. In other words, “People do not use city parks and squares because they are parks and squares, but because of the uses to which adjoining streets put them.” -The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
I love this book, and it is used in many Urban Planning courses. She notes that Rockefeller Plaza works because it borrows life from the city. It is surrounded by offices, shops, restaurants, transit and used all day by different groups (workers, tourists, skaters, diners). Rockefeller Plaza succeeds because it is intensely connected to daily life and fed by continuous pedestrian traffic.
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"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jacobs, Jane <--- best book I read this year
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- Some of my favourites from this year:
* The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. Classic urbanist book that changed the way I see my city, and elegantly described so many things I didn't know I knew.
* A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers. Short, beautiful sci-fi story.
* The first four Dune books by Frank Herbert, so full of intrigue.
- "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs.
This book completely changed how I view my city and other urban areas. I am now much more in-tune with my urban environment and understand how different aspects of it affect me emotionally.
It also led me to going back to graduate school for a degree in urban design and sustainability, and my focus is now how I can use my computer science background to improve my environment.
- In the U.S. I don’t think this is a concern, thankfully. Most of our cities have infill opportunities. In Columbus, Ohio where I live there’s hundreds of acres of surface parking lots. Buy them up and build housing blocks like in NYC. This solves lots of problems. [1]
> I actually think that for the most part what people aren't willing to accept is that the capitalist model actually does allocate housing fairly well according to need
I generally agree as well, but it seems like we are no longer satisfying lower ends of the market and developers would prefer to not build rather than build homes that don’t hit their IRR numbers. The federal government in the US could build housing and auction it off to individuals or families or run a sort of lottery system. Could add a few rules to prevent bad actors from renting the places out or something along those lines.
[1] As an aside everyone working for the housing agency or federal transportation admin should have to read The Death and Life of Great American Cities and be treated in that knowledge before taking a job there.
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