The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs

Vintage Books, 1992 - Architecture - 458 pages

Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and keenly detailed, a monumental work that provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense. --The New York Times

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.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - mrgan - LibraryThing

I'm in agreement with everything so far and I'm sure the rest of the book is fine, but it's rather drawn out and, in another reviewer's phrase, "easy to put down".

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - gypsysmom - LibraryThing

It took me a long time to read this book but at no time did I feel like stopping. It's just that I had to take my time to digest all the important messages Jacobs gave in the book and then think about ...

Contents

• Introduction: 3
• Part One THE PECULIAR NATURE OF CITIES: 27
• safety: 29
• contact: 55
• assimilating children: 74
• The uses of neighborhood parks: 89
• The uses of city neighborhoods: 112
• Part Two THE CONDITIONS FOR CITY DIVERSITY: 141
• The generators of diversity: 143
• The need for primary mixed uses: 152
• The need for small blocks: 178
• The need for aged buildings: 187
• The need for concentration: 200
• Some myths about diversity: 222
• Part Three FORCES OF DECLINE AND REGENERATION: 239
• The selfdestruction of diversity: 241
• The curse of border vacuums: 257
• Unslumming and slumming: 270
• Gradual money and cataclysmic money: 291
• Part Four DIFFERENT TACTICS: 319
• Subsidizing dwellings 32 1: 321
• Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles 338 18: 338
• its limitations and possibilities: 372
• Salvaging projects: 392
• Governing and planning districts: 405
• The kind of problem a city is: 428
• Index: 449

About the author

Jane Jacobs was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that has never gone out of print and that has transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, The Nature of Economies and Dark Age Ahead. She died in 2006.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Death and Life of Great American Cities; Vintage Books ed
• Author: Jane Jacobs
• Edition: reprint, reissue
• Publisher: Vintage Books, 1992
• ISBN: 067974195X, 9780679741954
• Length: 458 pages
• Subjects: Architecture / Urban & Land Use Planning; Social Science / Regional Studies; Social Science / Sociology / Urban