The Death and Life of Great American CitiesA 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. |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - mrgan - LibraryThingI'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". Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - gypsysmom - LibraryThingIt 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 ... Read full review
Contents
QMBUN | 7 |
Introduction | 13 |
safety 29 | 27 |
contact | 55 |
assirniladng children | 74 |
The uses of neighborhood parks | 89 |
The uses of city neighborhoods | 112 |
The generators of diversity | 143 |
The selfdestruction of diversity 241 | 240 |
The curse of border vacuums 2 57 | 257 |
Unslumming and slumming | 270 |
Gradual money and cataclysmic money | 291 |
Part Four DIFFERENT TACTICS | 318 |
Subsidizing dwellings | 319 |
Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles | 338 |
its limitations and possibilities | 372 |
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Common terms and phrases
administrative architectural attrition automobiles Avenue Back-of-the-Yards become big cities blocks borders Boston Brooklyn cars cataclysmic Chatham Village choice city districts city diversity city neighborhoods city planning city streets city’s complexity cross-use downtown dwelling densities East Harlem economic effective enterprises example figure finance financial find first five functional Garden City Greenwich Village housing projects idea influence kind lack land landmarks Le Corbusier live Lower East Side Manhattan means ment metropolitan mixture neighbor North End old buildings organization overcrowding pedestrian physical planners population primary problem public housing Radiant City reason rent residential residents restaurants Rittenhouse Square Sara Delano Roosevelt sidewalk significant Skid Row slum social space specific Square street neighborhoods Stuyvesant Town subsidy suburban suburbs successful tactics tenants things tion town traffic understand unslumming users visual vitality York York’s zoning