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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Fascinating, robust and meticulous
"The point of cities is multiplicity of choice"First of all, I'll repeat here with my own words a disclaimer that the author offers in the book: this work is about cities in America (think NYC, Atlanta, or St. Louis) and its arguments are not applicable or intended for towns and smaller communities.Even though I'm no expert in urbanism, sociology or architecture I was left with the impression that this book must be a classic and an absolute gem on these subjects. This is a meticulous book.The author definitely had spent an enormous amount of time observing cities and people in cities before writing this book. And that contributes to the empirical, incremental nature of her thought, as opposed to "ivory tower" urbanists, who planned cities from clerk desks and college rooms (something that ran wild in post-WW2 America).One of the main themes of Mrs. Jacobs is the necessity to create conditions for diversity in cities, everything else being hugely impacted by this single factor. You want to have neighborhoods that have a mix of people from different backgrounds and occupations (this guarantees, for example, that streets don't all go empty at 6 o'clock, et cetera). Diversity also impacts the economic health of a place, and attracts residents and visitors to interact in a more complete way.The book mentions countless things that, to the uninitiated, may appear at first simple, such as preferring smaller vs larger blocks, as the former are inherently more attractive to pedestrians and therefore more conducive to business activity and safety.There's a lot of criticism for the planners of housing projects that focused on sterile "green" spaces as if a park magically makes communities more livable while ignoring much more important aspects such as access to business activities, walkability and safety. These planners the author changes with the fault of planning, in the abstract, poorly thought places that real people live in reality.There's also much criticism about the many ways in which city planning, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, promoted racial discrimination in America.Remarkably little of the book is dedicated to the critique of cars (it is there, but much less than I expected).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 this book and time, in my opinion, has validated her ideas and made them more relevant than ever.This is a tremendous work, full of provocative humor and from a truly independent thinker who wrote about cities in a humanistic way.
Top reviews from other countries
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Amazon CustomerReviewed in Brazil on November 6, 2024
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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Diego Hernández GarcíaReviewed in Mexico on October 24, 2022
ME LLEVO SUPER MALTRATADO EL LIBRO
- Alaska BouvetReviewed in Sweden on March 11, 2023
Should read if you interested in city planning
