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Jane Jacobs

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities Kindle Edition

by Jane Jacobs (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 1,566 ratings

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Thirty years after its publication, 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, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"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

"Magnificent ... Describes with brilliant specificity what works and what doesn't in cities, in language that is fearless and crisp as a trumpet blast." —Rebecca Solnit

"Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning... Jacobs has a powerful sense of narrative, a lively wit, a talent for surprise and the ability to touch the emotions as well as the mind" —The New York Times Book Review

"One of the most remarkable books ever written about the city ... a primary work. The research apparatus is not pretentious—it is the eye and the heart—but it has given us a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city." —William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man

From the Inside Flap

A classic since its publication in 1961, this book is the defintive statement on American cities: what makes them safe, how they function, and why all too many official attempts at saving them have failed.

From the Back Cover

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the shortsightedness 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.

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Foreword to the Modern Library Edition

When I began work on this book in 1958, I expected merely to describe the civilizing and enjoyable services that good city street life casually provides-and to deplore planning fads and architectural fashions that were expunging these necessities and charms instead of helping to strengthen them. Some of Part One of this book: that's all I intended.

But learning and thinking about city streets and the trickiness of city parks launched me into an unexpected treasure hunt. I quickly found that the valuables in plain sight-streets and parks-were intimately mingled with clues and keys to other peculiarities of cities. Thus one discovery led to another, then another--.Some of the findings from the hunt fill the rest of this book. Others, as they turned up, have gone into four further books. Obviously, this book exerted an influence on me, and lured me into my subsequent life's work. But has it been influential otherwise? My own appraisal is yes and no.

Some people prefer doing their workaday errands on foot, or feel they would like to if they lived in a place where they could. Other people prefer hopping into the car to do errands, or would like to if they had a car. In the old days, before automobiles, some people liked ordering up carriages or sedan chairs and many wished they could. But as we know from novels, biographies, and legends, some people whose social positions required them to ride-except for rural rambles-wistfully peered out at passing street scenes and longed to participate in their camaraderie, bustle, and promises of surprise and adventure.

In a kind of shorthand, we can speak of foot people and car people. This book was instantly understood by foot people, both actual and wishful. They recognized that what it said jibed with their own enjoyment, concerns, and experiences, which is hardly surprising, since much of the book's information came from observing and listening to foot people. They were collaborators in the research. Then, reciprocally, the book collaborated with foot people by giving legitimacy to what they already knew for themselves. Experts of the time did not respect what foot people knew and valued. They were deemed old-fashioned and selfish-troublesome sand in the wheels of progress. It is not easy for uncredentialed people to stand up to the credentialed, even when the so-called expertise is grounded in ignorance and folly. This book turned out to be helpful ammunition against such experts. But it is less accurate to call this effect "influence" than to see it as corroboration and collaboration. Conversely, the book neither collaborated with car people nor had an influence on them. It still does not, as far as I can see.

The case of students of city planning and architecture is similarly mixed, but with special oddities. At the time of the book's publication, no matter whether the students were foot or car people by experience and temperament, they were being rigorously trained as anti-city and anti-street designers and planners: trained as if they were fanatic car people and so was everybody else. Their teachers had been trained or indoctrinated that way too. So in effect, the whole establishment concerned with the physical form of cities (including bankers, developers, and politicians who had assimilated the planning and architectural visions and theories) acted as gatekeepers protecting forms and visions inimical to city life. However, among architectural students especially, and to some extent among planning students, there were foot people. To them, the book made sense. Their teachers (though not all) tended to consider it trash or "bitter, coffee-house rambling" as one planner put it. Yet the book, curiously enough, found its way onto required or optional reading lists-sometimes, I suspect, to arm students with awareness of the benighted ideas they would be up against as practitioners. Indeed, one university teacher told me just that. But for foot people among students, the book was subversive. Of course their subversion was by no means all my doing. Other authors and researchers-notably William H. Whyte-were also exposing the unworkability and joylessness of anti-city visions. In London, editors and writers of The Architectural Review were already up to the same thing in the mid-1950s.

Nowadays, many architects, and some among the younger generation of planners, have excellent ideas-beautiful, ingenious ideas-for strengthening city life. They also have the skills to carry out their plans. These people are a far cry from the ruthless, heedless city manipulators I have castigated.

But here we come to something sad. Although the numbers of arrogant old gatekeepers have dwindled with time, the gates themselves are another matter. Anti-city planning remains amazingly sturdy in American cities. It is still embodied in thousands of regulations, bylaws, and codes, also in bureaucratic timidities owing to accepted practices, and in unexamined public attitudes hardened by time. Thus, one may be sure that there have been enormous and dedicated efforts in the face of these obstacles wherever one sees stretches of old city buildings that have been usefully recycled for new and different purposes; wherever sidewalks have been widened and vehicular roadways narrowed precisely where they should be-on streets in which pedestrian traffic is bustling and plentiful; wherever downtowns are not deserted after their offices close; wherever new, fine-grained mixtures of street uses have been fostered successfully; wherever new buildings have been sensitively inserted among old ones to knit up holes and tatters in a city neighborhood so that the mending is all but invisible. Some foreign cities have become pretty good at these feats. But to try to accomplish such sensible things in America is a daunting ordeal at best, and often enough heartbreaking.

In Chapter Twenty of this book I proposed that the ground levels of self-isolating projects within cities could be radically erased and reconstituted with two objects in view: linking the projects into the normal city by fitting them out with plentiful, new, connecting streets; and converting the projects themselves into urban places at the same time, by adding diverse new facilities along those added streets. The catch here, of course, is that new commercial facilities would need to work out economically, as a measure of their genuine and not fake usefulness.

It is disappointing that this sort of radical replanning has not been tried-as far as I know-in the more than thirty years since this book was published. To be sure, with every decade that passes, the task of carrying out the proposal would seem to be more difficult. That is because anti-city projects, especially massive public housing projects, tend to cause their city surroundings to deteriorate, so that as time passes, less and less healthy adjoining city is available to tie into.

Even so, good opportunities still exist for converting city projects into city. Easy ones ought to be tried first on the premise that this is a learning challenge, and it is good policy for all learning to start with easy cases and work up to more difficult ones. The time is coming when we will sorely need to apply this learning to suburban sprawls since it is unlikely we can continue extending them without limit. The costs in energy waste, infrastructure waste, and land waste are too high. Yet if already existing sprawls are intensified, in favor of thriftier use of resources, we need to have learned how to make the intensifications and linkages attractive, enjoyable, safe, and sustainable-for foot people as well as car people.

Occasionally this book has been credited with having helped halt urban-renewal and slum-clearance programs. I would be delighted to take credit if this were true. It isn't. Urban renewal and slum clearance succumbed to their own failures and fiascos, after continuing with their extravagant outrages for many years after this book was published. Even now they pop up when wishful thinking and forgetfulness set in, abetted by sufficient cataclysmic money lent to developers and sufficient political hubris and public subsidies. A recent example, for instance, is the grandiose but bankrupt Canary Wharf project set in isolation in what were London's dilapidated docklands and the demolished, modest Isle of Dogs community, beloved by its inhabitants.

To return to the treasure hunt that began with the streets and one thing leading to another and another: at some point along the trail I realized I was engaged in studying the ecology of cities. Offhand, this sounds like taking note that raccoons nourish themselves from city backyard gardens and garbage bags (in my own city they do, sometimes even downtown), that hawks can possibly reduce pigeon populations among skyscrapers, and so on. But by city ecology I mean something different from, yet similar to, natural ecology as students of wilderness address the subject. A natural ecosystem is defined as "composed of physical-chemical-biological processes active within a space-time unit of any magnitude." A city ecosystem is composed of physical-economic-ethical processes active at a given time within a city and its close dependencies. I've made up this definition, by analogy.

The two sorts of ecosystems-one created by nature, the other by human beings-have fundamental principles in common. For instance, both types of ecosystems-assuming they are not barren-require much diversity to sustain themselves. In both cases, the diversity develops organically over time, and the varied components are interdependent in complex ways. The more niches for diversity of life and livelihoods in either kind of ecosystem, the greater its carrying capacity for life. In both types of ecosystems, many small and obscure components-easily overlooked by superficial observation can be vital to the whole, far out of proportion to their own tininess of scale or aggregate quantities. In natural ecosystems, gene pools are fundamental treasures. In city ecosystems, kinds of work are fundamental treasures; furthermore, forms of work not only reproduce themselves in newly created proliferating organizations, they also hybridize, and even mutate into unprecedented kinds of work. And because of their complex interdependencies of components, both kinds of ecosystems are vulnerable and fragile, easily disrupted or destroyed.

If not fatally disrupted, however, they are tough and resilient. And when their processes are working well, ecosystems appear stable. But in a profound sense, the stability is an illusion. As a Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, observed long ago, everything in the natural world is in flux. When we suppose we see static situations, we actually see processes of beginning and processes of ending occurring simultaneously. Nothing is static. It is the same with cities. Thus, to investigate either natural or city ecosystems demands the same kind of thinking. It does not do to focus on "things" and expect them to explain much in themselves. Processes are always of the essence; things have significances as participants in processes, for better or worse.

This way of seeing is fairly young and new, which is perhaps why the hunt for knowledge to understand either natural or city ecology seems so inexhaustible. Little is known; so much yet to know.

We human beings are the only city-building creatures in the world. The hives of social insects are fundamentally different in how they develop, what they do, and their potentialities. Cities are in a sense natural ecosystems too-for us. They are not disposable. Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon; they have pulled their weight and more. It is the same still. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

It is urgent that human beings understand as much as we can about city ecology-starting at any point in city processes. The humble, vital services performed by grace of good city streets and neighborhoods are probably as good a starting point as any. So I find it heartening that The Modem Library is issuing this beautiful new edition for a new generation of readers who, I hope, will become interested in city ecology, respect its marvels, discover more.

Jane Jacobs
Toronto, Canada October 1992

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B01HWKSBDI
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Reissue edition (July 20, 2016)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ July 20, 2016
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2.7 MB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 448 pages

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Customers find this book insightful and important for city planning. They describe it as vibrant, nice, and sparkling. Many consider it a good value and a must-read for planners. The book helps readers appreciate the value of diversity in cities. However, some customers feel the writing quality is poor and filled with typos.

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119 customers mention "Readability"113 positive6 negative

Customers find the book insightful and important for city planners. They describe it as a no-nonsense guide with first-hand observations. Readers appreciate the thorough analysis and consider it a classic work.

"...Her words, her thinking and writing are all contemporary, as even the older issues she discusses are now being deconstructed and it is interesting..." Read more

"...makes vibrant neighborhoods is just interesting stuff going on, easy to get around, changes of scenery everywhere, with diverse kinds of business..." Read more

"...who are attached to that place, can make it into a thriving, interesting neighborhood. Just like (or even better than) the one I described just now...." Read more

"The book is very interesting and easy to understand. It's written in way that isn't boring...." Read more

14 customers mention "Look"14 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's appearance. They find it visually appealing, with a vibrant cover and printing. The book is described as an engaging read about urban life that makes readers feel like city natives. The prose is described as sparkling and the cover color is beautiful.

"...Her style is evocative and able to tease out subtle ideas in amusing, succinct and yet on-the-mark ways. She just nails it each time...." Read more

"...American Cities is a no-nonsense guide on how to make cities lively, vibrant, humane places to live and work...." Read more

"...It is well worth the money and by far the most beautiful hardcover book I've ever purchased for the price...." Read more

"A nice, civilian look at urban life, specifically on the city sidewalk. Jacobs is informed, but not expert, and her writing reflects this...." Read more

11 customers mention "Value for money"8 positive3 negative

Customers find the book a good value for money. They say it's a great edition and worth reading.

"...EVERYBODY should buy the hardcover edition. It is well worth the money and by far the most beautiful hardcover book I've ever purchased for the..." Read more

"...Her writing is a little repetitive but well worth the read. I recommend this if you are an Urban studies / Political Science major or minor." Read more

"...Not a thoughtful examination of the topic. A waste of money." Read more

"...Get the nicely bound Modern Library version. It's relatively cheap and feels good. I'll end with a question. Why did she move to Toronto?" Read more

9 customers mention "Relevance"9 positive0 negative

Customers find the book relevant and interesting. They appreciate the origins of many ideas, which seem ground-breaking.

"...she discusses are now being deconstructed and it is interesting to read the origins of many of these ideas which seem like such obvious blunders you..." Read more

"...50 years later, this book is still relevant...." Read more

"...Even today, her ideas are extraordinary and ground breaking...." Read more

"...The book may be dated, but contains a relevant and concrete critique of urban development and sprawl that are still applicable today." Read more

5 customers mention "Book value"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book useful. They say it's a must-read for students studying urban planning, a good copy to have at the bedside, and a great read for planners.

"...that could get tedious if read straight through, it's a good book to have at the bedside to read in chunks." Read more

"...the opinion of the overwhelming majority of readers that it is an important book...." Read more

"Phenomenal read for planners! Must have for your library, so well written and entertaining even for today." Read more

"Another of the few indispensable books for any uni student studying Urban Design or Urban Planning on BA or Masters courses." Read more

5 customers mention "Diversity"5 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the value of diversity in cities. They find that it fosters fascinating networks of interest and engagement, with various kinds of business and activity throughout the day. The book focuses on New York City but includes a few others. It also shows how people congregate and look out for one another, whether they know it or not.

"...and cities for a long time with intelligence and with an equal gift in communicating...." Read more

"...to get around, changes of scenery everywhere, with diverse kinds of business and activity through the day...." Read more

"...where we walk, where kids play, where people congregate and look out for one another—whether they know they are doing it or not...." Read more

"...This book helped me appreciate the value of diversity (building types and age, usage, etc.) in cities...." Read more

6 customers mention "Age of book"3 positive3 negative

Customers have different views on the book's age. Some find it timely today as when written in 1961, and a must-read for city planners. Others say the themes and ideas stand the test of time, but some consider the book too old.

"...This book was written over 60 years ago, at a time when American planners were mostly engaged in work that is very much contrary to the notions of..." Read more

"This book is old, outdated, and written in a very snide, judgmental tone of voice...." Read more

"As timely today as when written in 1961. A must read for city planners!" Read more

"...Though the book is older, the themes and ideas stand the test of time." Read more

4 customers mention "Writing quality"0 positive4 negative

Customers find the writing quality poor. They mention the book is old, outdated, and written in a snide and judgmental tone. Many pages have pen notation and writing, and the modern library is filled with odd typos.

"Almost every page has pen notation and writing. I would not have purchased this book, had I known...." Read more

"I think Jane Jacobs is brilliant and thoughtful. Her writing is a little repetitive but well worth the read...." Read more

"This book is old, outdated, and written in a very snide, judgmental tone of voice...." Read more

"...This edition by the Modern library, however, is filled with odd typos...." Read more

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Rebecca
The muzaking of American cities
Reviewed in the United States on July 7, 2015
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Everyone has opinions about their city and the different neighborhoods. Some areas are vibrant and energy giving, while others are so dreary they knock the wind out of you. Often the reasons seem clear and you just wish you could find the nincompoops responsible and make them spend the rest of their lives living in their creation. But other times you know you don't like it but the reasons are a little more nebulous. Jane Jacobs is able to quickly and expertly delineate it all in this wonderful book. You will look at cities with a new expert eye.

This topic could be really tedious to read - but it's not! Within the first few pages I could tell I was in the hands of someone skilled and capable, a master at the nature of spaces and nimble with words and ideas. Jacobs was not a planner, nor an academic but a person who had been thinking and writing about architecture and cities for a long time with intelligence and with an equal gift in communicating. Her style is evocative and able to tease out subtle ideas in amusing, succinct and yet on-the-mark ways. She just nails it each time.

Published in 1961 but for the most part, reads current. Her words, her thinking and writing are all contemporary, as even the older issues she discusses are now being deconstructed and it is interesting to read the origins of many of these ideas which seem like such obvious blunders you just scratch your head at the powers-that-were who conceived them. As she puts it, "expressways that eviscerate great cities...These amputated areas typically develop galloping gangrene" and the "Low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Middle-income housing projects which are truly marvels of dullness and regimentation, sealed against any buoyancy or vitality of city life. Luxury housing projects that mitigate their inanity, or try to, with a vapid vulgarity. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore."

"Monopolistic shopping centers and monumental cultural centers cloak, under the public relations hoohaw, the subtraction of commerce, and of culture too." Or one of my pet peeves, "Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders" - these seem prevalent around civic centers and drive me crazy as I walk for my transportation, the long expanses of concrete and lawn with a few concrete benches. In Paris they would put a little outdoor cafe and some trees in the middle so that one can cross that desert with an espresso pit-stop but too often there is nothing, and one starts across the huge block already fatigued wondering how it is possible that even the green of the lawn looks unappealing, that nature is devoid of its charm in these circumstances. That's not to say that Europe avoided these problems, they built tons of social housing or offices. I see examples of them every day where I live, in the middle of a vibrant city suddenly one comes upon a 1970s "super-block" with a few high rises planted in the middle of a vast patchwork of concrete and never-used lawn and bits of graffiti on lonely concrete benches. Walking these super-blocks feels like being plunged into jello, heavy, plodding and onerous. But now I understand there was thoughtful thinking behind these but like lots of theories, things just didn't work out as they hoped or were anemic budgeted and bureaucratized versions of the original vision.

Thankfully, most cities are striving to be more livable now, it's too bad that a new problem has emerged, that they are losing diversity as they become unaffordable. She also goes into the suburbs, which along with small towns, now often seem to be the new repositories of those with no choice. Enough rant. She actually spends a lot of time talking about what is good, what works and why and that too is illuminating. You know you love these things about certain neighborhoods but you don't quite know all the reasons why, why exactly it feels more vibrant, alive, organic and a place where life can bloom.

This is eminently relevant and readable. Another review complained about her use of language made it hard to follow. She is really descriptive, perhaps that could get tedious if read straight through, it's a good book to have at the bedside to read in chunks.

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Ulysses
what are the essential features of a flourishing city?
Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2024
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I've been looking forward to reading this for a long time, and it still far exceeded my expectations.

I have spent some time thinking about Christopher Alexander's books, which provide a kaleidoscope of "patterns"; vision-fragments of what makes a house or neighborhood have "life". It's not recipes, so much as a collection of tasteful flavor combinations that are also nutritious. It remains a mysterious art for architects to feel their way through these combinations, really through the underlying principles, to put together projects that nourish life for the people and communities that inhabit them. Clearly, it's an art, because you see projects that outwardly have similar design elements, yet some of them sing while others fall flat.

But, before Christopher Alexander, there was Jane Jacobs. Her narrative starting point is an engagingly passionate diatribe against "grand" city planning schemes that are rooted in early industrial-era aesthetics of the smoothly-running machine. Jacobs makes a convincing case that these design principles for the organization of cities tend actually to produce disastrous stagnation, which is then continuously "solved" in ways that exacerbate, or simply relocate, the very destruction they propose to ameliorate. That's the definition of irony.

It seems that many of these systems problems remain pervasive, and I think she would say destructively ill-conceived, "today". She wrote this book in 1960, but it still feels timely. One can see how systems and principles put in place in the domains of finance, management, and aesthetics have failed to produce their predicted results. She argues further that to remain dedicated to those principles seems to require taking the view that it is just capricious human nature that keeps causing people to fail to realize the benefits of these beautiful designs.

To the degree that city planning has gotten a clue since the time of Jacobs' writing, I suspect that a big part of the clue comes from Jacobs herself. To understand that, you need to read this book, to get the insights that have driven those changes.

Like Christopher Alexander on individual structures and small communities, Jacobs teaches against the idea that there is a single template for a successful organization of a city. Yet she nevertheless bravely finds a true science in this study, which she likens to domains of scientific inquiry that remain cutting-edge today. I think any reader must be continuously amazed at her prescience, and vision, and her humanity.

The central idea in this work is pretty simple: the best thing about cities is that they foster fascinating, intense, diverse networks of interest and engagement. What makes vibrant neighborhoods is just interesting stuff going on, easy to get around, changes of scenery everywhere, with diverse kinds of business and activity through the day.

While I have taken on her basic thesis for ongoing thinking, I am also wrestling with a question about the degree to which she underestimates the "friction" of corruption, greed, fear of the other, and so forth. In an "unslumming" city neighborhood, where what is most needed is "gradual money" that can foster small businesses, maybe cut a few streets through long blocks to increase diverse flow -- in that neighborhood, how easy is it for the powerful to show up with arguments about "clearing blight" and "creating new business" in order to perpetuate fat contracts and massive building that ends up stifling the small-scale activity that was just beginning to take root? The best answer is that it's a lot harder with this book out there in peoples' minds, giving them new ideas about how to protect and grow the thing that is making their neighborhood beautiful in the first place.

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Amazon Customer
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Reviewed in Brazil on November 6, 2024
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Um livro interessante

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Diego Hernández García
ME LLEVO SUPER MALTRATADO EL LIBRO
Reviewed in Mexico on October 24, 2022
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El libro me llego muy maltratado, doblado y roto de la pasta

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A ELSDEN
Jane Jacobs classic
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2025
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This book is dated but the elements of thinking about cities, human activity and organization are still valid today. Easy reading of reasoned arguments.

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Paolo
a must for those intersted in urbanism
Reviewed in Germany on July 1, 2024
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although urbanism changed a lot since this book was first released, in my opinion, this book belongs to the grassroots of contemporary urbanism, amazing to discover that Jacobs was neither an architect nor an engineer, although as a city dweller and planner lived in close contact with them.

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Helen
Fantastic book, great quality too!
Reviewed in Spain on September 28, 2023
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The book is of great quality paper, it is a pleasure to read. Very insightful book.

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5.0 out of 5 stars The muzaking of American cities

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5.0 out of 5 stars The Death and Life of Great American Cities

1.0 out of 5 stars ME LLEVO SUPER MALTRATADO EL LIBRO

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5.0 out of 5 stars a must for those intersted in urbanism

5.0 out of 5 stars Fantastic book, great quality too!

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The muzaking of American cities

what are the essential features of a flourishing city?

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

ME LLEVO SUPER MALTRATADO EL LIBRO

Jane Jacobs classic

a must for those intersted in urbanism

Fantastic book, great quality too!