The Death and Life of Great American Cities Paperback – December 1, 1992

This 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, a one-time writer for architectural magazines in New York City, turned the world of city planning on its head. The author, who possessed no formal training in architecture or city planning, relied on personal observations of her surroundings in Greenwich Village in New York City to supply ammunition for her charges against the grand muftis of the architectural profession. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" consists mostly of common sense observations, but there is also a good amount of statistical information, economics, sociology, and some philosophy at the base of the author's arguments. This 1993 Modern Library reprint seeks to bring Jacobs's work to a whole new generation of readers, a necessity when one realizes that a majority of the problems plaguing cities in 1961 continue to be a problem today.
Jacobs begins her book with a brief history of where modern city planning came from. According to the author, the mess we call cities today emerged from Utopian visionaries from Europe and America beginning in the 19th century. Figures such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, and Daniel Burnham all had a significantly dreadful impact on how urban areas are built and rebuilt. These men all envisioned the city as a dreadful place, full of overcrowding, crime, disease, and ugliness. Howard wished to destroy big cities completely in order to replace them with small towns, or "Garden Cities," made up of small populations. Similar in thought to Howard, Mumford argued for a decentralization of cities into thinned out areas resembling towns. Le Corbusier, says Jacobs, inaugurated yet another harmful plan for cities: the "Radiant City." A radiant city consists of skyscrapers surrounded by wide swaths of parks where vast concentrations of people herded into one area could live and work. Burnham's contribution to planning was "City Monumental," where all of the grand buildings (libraries, government buildings, concert halls, landmarks) of a city could be clustered in one agglomeration separated from the dirty, bad city. Jacobs writes that all of these ideas continue to exert influence on the modern city, and that all of these ideas do not work.
For Jacobs, the key to a successful city rests on one word: diversity. This is not specifically an ethnic diversity, although Jacobs does vaguely include this in her arguments. Rather, diversity means different buildings, different residences, different businesses, and different amounts of people in an area at different times. The antithesis of diversity is what we see today on a stroll through downtown: a bland uniformity of office buildings, apartment dwellings, and houses that stretch as far the eyes can see. In the author's view, this lack of diversification leads to economic stagnation, slums, crime, and a host of other horrors that are all too familiar to viewers of the evening news. Especially egregious to Jacobs is the tendency to isolate low-income people in towering projects surrounded by empty space. The lack of embedded businesses in these areas, along with closed in hallways and elevators (which Jacobs calls "interior sidewalks and streets") creates a breeding ground for criminal elements and bad morale among the residents. Cities that work best employ a wide range of diverse interests that attract, not repel, people. Unfortunately, bureaucrats and social planners always believe top down planning is better than bottom up initiative. Jacobs tries to show the fallacy of social planning.
The amount of ground covered in this book is amazing. The author examines the role and practicality of parks, sidewalks, business interests, city government, streets, automobiles versus pedestrians, and boundaries. Repeatedly, Jacobs discovered fatal errors in how planners build cities. She found parks placed in the sunless shadows of skyscrapers or at the end of dead end streets, narrow sidewalks incapable of carrying heavy foot traffic, city blocks so long that people avoided walking down them, and city governments too fragmented to carry on effective management. All of these things eventually led to abandonment and degradation. Even worse, when a planned section of the city failed the planners came back and razed it to the ground in order to replace it with yet more failure.
One of Jacobs's failings in the book is that she never seems to make the connection between urban planning and social control. The housing projects are a great example. By isolating the poor, blacks as well as whites and other ethnic minorities, the state practices an effective control over these people's lives. This book inspired me to check into the fate of Cabrini-Green, Chicago's notorious housing projects that served as a role model for the abject uselessness of urban planning. These projects are in the process of being razed and replaced by mixed-income houses that, if Jacobs is accurate, may thrive due to the nearby presence of shopping areas and businesses. Of course, the planners are still in the game because they are sending most of the poor residents to other areas of the city.
I am probably not the best person to judge the merits of this book because I have never been to one of Jacobs's "Great Cities." I had difficulty imagining some of the layouts she mentioned in the book due to the simple fact that I have never seen them. Despite this small problem, there is still plenty of information in this book that does make perfect sense. You do not need to live in New York City or Philadelphia to recognize that parks with no sunlight will not be a big hit with the city denizens, or that older buildings are necessary to a neighborhood because they allow small businesses to exist with low overhead costs. "The Death and Life of Great Cities," despite its age, is still a relevant book well worth reading.

This is one of the books that made me realize what makes a city work and what makes it fail: Jacobs emphasizes that a healthy city neighborhood is created not by one "big box" destination like a convention center or a stadium, but by hundreds of little walkable destinations. Buffalo's downtown is a classic example: the Chippewa St. area (dominated by half a dozen little bars and coffeehouses) is relatively vibrant, while the areas near the convention center and stadium are dead, dead, dead. Similarly, in Cleveland the Warehouse District/Flats area (dominated by small, walkable businesses) are year-round destinations, while the areas surrounding the much-touted stadia and Rock Hall of Fame are utterly deserted after dark except on game days.
In response to the reviewer from N.H. who said Jacobs vindicates conservatism: I don't completely agree. Jacobs' work criticizes liberal reliance on big government housing/urban renewal projects, but is equally critical of big government highway projects that a lot of conservatives seem to like.

Even 35 years after it was written, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities remains the classic book on how cities work and
how urban planners and others have naively destroyed
functioning cities. It is widely known for its incisive
treatment of those who would tear down functioning neighborhoods
and destroy the lives and livelihoods of people for the sake of a
groundless but intellectually appealing daydream.

But although many see it as a polemic against urban planning,
the best parts of it, the parts that have endeared it to
many who love cities, are quite different. Death and Life
is, first of all, a work of observation. The illustrations
are all around us, she says, and we must go and look. She
shows us parts of the city that are alive -- the streets,
she says, are the city that we see, and it is the streets and
sidewalks that carry the most weight -- and find the patterns
that help us not merely see but understand. She shows us the city as
an ecology -- a system of interactions that is more than
merely the laying out of buildings as if they were a
child's wooden blocks.

But observation can mean simply the noting of objects.
Ms. Jacobs writes beautifully, lovingly, of New York
City and other urban places. Her piece "The Ballet of
Hudson Street" is both an observation of events on the
Greenwich Village street where she lived and a prose poem
describing the comings and goings of the people, the rhythms
of the shopkeepers and the commuters and others who use the
street.

In this day when "inner city" is a synonym for poverty
and hopelessness, it is important to be reminded that
cities are literally the centers of civilization, of
business, of culture. This is just as true today as it was
in the early 1960s when this was written. We in North
America owe Jane Jacobs a great debt for her insight and her
eloquence.

I owe Jane Jacobs a huge debt of gratitude. After reading her book I chose a home within walking distance of everything I needed. It was not in good shape, and I had to put money and sweat into getting it in shape. But she was right that suburbs are not sustainable and it was a terrible place to get stuck if the price of oil went up.

I have a community of friends I did not have in the suburbs and as the price of gas soars I don't have to move my car to get 90% of the things I need. Thank you Jane Jacobs, your work changed my life for the better.