The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Fantastic American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town preparation….[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 preparation theory can still be read for pleasure even by persons who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book’s opinion.” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and energy were being ruined by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs’s tiny masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The leader has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.
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Jacobs classic urbanism text lends flowing descriptions of the living city. It lacks rigorous analysis, but this is easily subsidized by the recent tour de force by Yale professor Doug Rae – City: Urbanism and Its End.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The significance of Jane Jacobs’s book is really twofold. One reason is point; it offers a devastating critique of urban preparation. The additional is more all-purpose; it lies in the degree to which this amateur’s analysis calls into question the very concepts of bureaucratic expertise and federal preparation. On cities specifically, Jacobs was an early and prescient voice warning that what was being billed as urban renewal–huge housing projects, highway building, creation of business districts, etc.–was really destroying neighborhoods and making more problems than it was solving. Subsequent events of the past forty years have certainly borne out her argument that the planners were killing cities. An apt companion piece for her book would be The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro, wherein the leader demonstrates in detail that these plans came to be more about the exercise of power by the civil “servants” than about really helping city dwellers. The high rise housing projects that blight our urban landscape stand as eloquent testimony to the fact that, regardless of their original intentions, the bureaucrats of the Fantastic Society wasted billions of dollars pursuing disastrous policies and left only ruin in their wake.
Of course, Urban Renewal was just one aspect of the liberal do-gooders sustained assault on the poor families of our fantastic cities. Similarly interventionist–and equally deleterious in their effect–were thoughts like Welfare, the Sexual Revolution, and so on… The entire panoply of supposedly kindly government programs of the post-Depression era all had presumably unintended, though entirely foreseeable, adverse consequences for their supposed beneficiaries. Jacobs’ thesis is easily expanded, as indeed she has in successive books, to encompass all federal government preparation. The alternative vision she offers, of more organic development (basically allowing Free Market forces to function), is certainly the prevailing notion today, at least rhetorically. It is surely no coincidence that the rebirth of cities like New York has come about under the leadership of Republican mayors. But one need only look at New York’s schools to realize that the bureaucrats are fighting a tenacious rearguard action. Virtually the entire book could be applied to today’s education system.
One surefire sign that this book still strikes a nerve among the liberal elites is its indefensible exclusion from the Modern Library Top 100 List. Of course, that list includes as a replacement for the insipid The City in History (1961) (Lewis Mumford 1895-1990)(see Orrin’s review). Mumford’s book is mostly self evident past analysis, devoid of thoughts. In sharp contrast, Jacobs’ book is all thought, timeless thoughts, and a slap in the face of the modern statists of the Left and the enormous hubris which convinces them that they should make our decisions for us.
One thing I especially like about books like Jacobs’, is that they remind folks that conservatives aren’t merely reactionaries–sniping at noble but misguided social policies only after they’ve failed–but really foresaw the catastrophic effect that Huge Government would have on our lives and warned against it at the time. On the additional hand, it’s kind of frightening how much of this book remains timely and germane today; but in recent years it does at least seem as if Jacobs’ vision is finally winning. Let us hope so.
GRADE: A-
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The reviewer from New Hampshire blames huge government for the decline of city neighborhoods [through urban renewal], yet in so many contemporary American cities the free market forces have taken entire districts [lower Manhattan being a classic case in point] and turned them into office tower farms, which are just as empty after dark as the urban renewal neighborhoods he despises.
Regardless, Jacobs’ book is a fantastic, non-partisan look at what makes American cities tick; it is indeed a must-read for city dwellers who want to stay involved in their own political processes and keep the cities they inhabit worth living in.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5
I reflect you can best clarify Jane Jacobs’ seminal book with a song by Cat Stevens:
Well I reflect it’s fine, building giant planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Get what you want to if you want, ’cause you can get anything.
I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorryloads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems you can’t get off.
Oh, I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
When you crack the sky, scrapers fill the air.
Will you keep on building privileged
’til there’s no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us weep?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?
I know we’ve come a long way,
We’re changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
The first time I read Jane Jacobs opus to the city street, I was bowled over by what seemed to be just unadorned “common sense.” But, a second reading had much less impact. Having since read Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford and many additional of the architects and critics whom she panned, I realized just how weak an analysis she provided. Jane provided a most cursory review of past urban preparation thoughts, undeseveredly raking Lewis Mumford over the coals when he too protested against many of the redevelopment projects slated for New York in the 1950’s. In fact, what Jacobs does is go back to the early Modern preparation thoughts from the 1920’s and 30’s and leads readers to assume that the leading lights had not changed their views one iota since then. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Sure, European Modernism took root in America after WWII with Walter Gropius heading the Harvard School of Design and Mies van der Rohe doing his signature works in Chicago and New York, but what happened to American cities in the 1950’s was painstakingly American, and had roots going back to the 19th century manufacturing revolution. American cities were constantly being remade, very much like the image of America itself. The mid-rise and hi-rise housing complexes first place forwards in the 20’s were being seriously questioned by the architectural community in the 50’s, but developers saw these buildings as expedient and profitable solutions to the ever-increasing demand for housing. The federal and city governments supported these projects in the war on poverty. Yet, it was poverty that saved many of the neighborhoods which Jacobs described, along with community action groups which fought against the razing of their neighborhoods in the name of progress.
What Jane Jacobs has done is simply collect a set of anecdotes and provide a “from the hip” commentary on Modern preparation solutions, lacking any serious research into the theme. If she had taken a closer look, she would have seen how Le Corbusier’s own thoughts evolved momentously since he first extolled the manufacturing city, and how architects and planners, influenced by Le Corbusier’s recent directions, were already calling for a more human scale in urban development. But, Ms. Jacobs wanted to shock the public and did so by pointing out the worst in Modernism, and holding up a handful of New York and Chicago neighborhoods as the models for sympathetic development. The book is terribly dated with much finer work on the theme available through this bookstore.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5