The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Product Details

Author : Jane Jacobs
Binding : Paperback
EAN : 9780679741954
Edition : 1REV
Number of Pages : 458
Product Group : Book
Publication Date : 1992-12-01
Publisher : Vintage
Release Date : 1992-12-01

ASIN : 067974195X

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Customer Reviews

An Excellent Urban Work (2004-07-14)

When one begins to talk about city planning and urban land use, the name Jane Jacobs almost always comes up in the conversation. Jacobs is without question the leading scholar attacking the modern urban theories of development. If you ask any average suburban soccer mom or dad what the problem is with the city, they almost always say "it is too crowded!"

Jacobs is able to show that the real problem with cities isn't overpopulation - rather, it is exactly the opposite! The major problem with cities today is that they aren't dense enough. Empty sidewalks are inviting only to criminals. Children, shop keepers, and families hate an empty sidewalk.

Furthermore, city planners compound the situation by moving businesses (and therefore commerce) away from residences - thus resulting in a further decline of sidewalk traffic.

If you're going to be involved in city government, planning, or land use, you should definitely read this book. I'm a small government conservative, and lots of other conservatives are scared by Jacobs -- but let me tell you -- this is the future of America. We should accept and embrace this urban challenge.

inspiring & surprisingly accessible (2004-03-21)

This book reads like a novel rather than an ideological tome. If you think of it that way, the city is the protagonist and you feel like you're reading a bildundgsroman about this much put upon but always fascinating central character. Wow. Somebody recommended a Modern Library edition. I have to concur because this edition (paperback) is badly designed and hard to read. It's worth getting a nicer edition.

great (2004-03-17)

This is a great book. I read it on the subway and never lost interest. Even today it helps open your eyes to bad planning that occurs in cities that kills what otherwise could be successful neighborhoods.

A Must-have!! (2004-01-31)

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

New tools for looking at the world. (2004-01-11)

At the end of this book Jacobs refers to a seminal work in the evolving science of organized complexity. Yet her method of studying cities- what makes them work successfully and what causes them to fail - reminds me more of some of the 16th/17th century physical scientists such as Galileo. Like them, she looked at her world free of the misconceptions and implicit assumptions of the "authorities", the city planners who used deduction from false premises rather than induction from detailed observation. Jacobs is a fantastic observer. Like the early scientists she is then able to generalize, always mindful of the limitations of her generalizations, and like the earlier scientists (cf. Galileo and ship building) she is interested in practical technology (in her case practical policy). While copyrighted in 1961, this book is all too relevant today: while some of its ideas are mainstream, we are still making many of the same errors. She draws her observations from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco and for the reader familiar with those cities, especially the first three, there is an added dimension. I give this book 5 stars, because it provided me with new intellectual tools for analyzing the world, and it is fun applying them. At the same time, I will say that it is longer than it needs to be. Internalizing a concept, even one that may sound like common sense once it is enunciated, benefits from a certain amount of repetition and many examples, but there is too much repetition here.

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