The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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.


a book that changed my thinking   January 17, 2001
 53 out of 56 found this review helpful

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.


Anything But a Classic   June 16, 2002
 30 out of 55 found this review helpful

The first time I read Jane Jacobs opus to the city street, I was bowled over by what seemed to be just plain "common sense." However, a second reading had much less impact. Having since read Le Corbusier, Lewis Mumford and many other of the architects and critics whom she panned, I realized just how weak an analysis she provided. Jane provided a most cursory review of past urban planning ideas, undeseveredly raking Lewis Mumford over the coals when he too protested against many of the redevelopment projects slated for New York in the 1950's. In fact, what Jacobs does is go back to the early Modern planning ideas from the 1920's and 30's and leads readers to assume that the leading lights had not changed their views one iota since then. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Sure, European Modernism took root in America after WWII with Walter Gropius heading the Harvard School of Design and Mies van der Rohe doing his signature works in Chicago and New York, but what happened to American cities in the 1950's was thoroughly American, and had roots going back to the 19th century industrial revolution. American cities were constantly being remade, very much like the image of America itself. The mid-rise and hi-rise housing complexes first put forward in the 20's were being seriously questioned by the architectural community in the 50's, but developers saw these buildings as expedient and profitable solutions to the ever-increasing demand for housing. The federal and city governments supported these projects in the war on poverty. Yet, it was poverty that saved many of the neighborhoods which Jacobs described, along with community action groups which fought against the razing of their neighborhoods in the name of progress.

What Jane Jacobs has done is simply collect a set of anecdotes and provide a "from the hip" commentary on Modern planning solutions, without any serious research into the subject. If she had taken a closer look, she would have seen how Le Corbusier's own ideas evolved greatly since he first extolled the industrial city, and how architects and planners, influenced by Le Corbusier's recent directions, were already calling for a more human scale in urban development. But, Ms. Jacobs wanted to shock the public and did so by pointing out the worst in Modernism, and holding up a handful of New York and Chicago neighborhoods as the models for sympathetic development. The book is badly dated with much finer work on the subject available through this bookstore.


The classic exposition of how cities work. A must-read.   October 12, 1996
 20 out of 21 found this review helpful

Even 35 years after it was written, The Death and Life of Great AmericanCities 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.


a vision that's finally winning   October 23, 2000
 20 out of 43 found this review helpful

The significance of Jane Jacobs's book is really twofold. One reason is specific; it offers a devastating critique of urban planning. The other is more general; it lies in the degree to which this amateur's analysis calls into question the very concepts of bureaucratic expertise and centralized planning. On cities specifically, Jacobs was an early and prescient voice warning that what was being billed as urban renewal--big housing projects, highway building, creation of business districts, etc.--was actually destroying neighborhoods and creating more problems than it was solving. Subsequent events of the past forty years have certainly borne out her argument that the planners were killing cities. An apt companion piece for her book would be The Power Broker : Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert Caro, wherein the author demonstrates in detail that these plans came to be more about the exercise of power by the civil "servants" than about actually helping city dwellers. The high rise housing projects that blight our urban landscape stand as eloquent testimony to the fact that, regardless of their original intentions, the bureaucrats of the Great Society wasted billions of dollars pursuing disastrous policies and left only ruin in their wake.

Of course, Urban Renewal was just one aspect of the liberal do-gooders sustained assault on the poor families of our great cities. Similarly interventionist--and equally deleterious in their effect--were ideas like Welfare, the Sexual Revolution, and so on... The entire panoply of supposedly benevolent government programs of the post-Depression era all had presumably unintended, though entirely foreseeable, adverse consequences for their supposed beneficiaries. Jacobs' thesis is easily expanded, as indeed she has in successive books, to encompass all centralized government planning. The alternative vision she offers, of more organic development (basically allowing Free Market forces to function), is certainly the prevailing notion today, at least rhetorically. It is surely no coincidence that the rebirth of cities like New York has come about under the leadership of Republican mayors. But one need only look at New York's schools to realize that the bureaucrats are fighting a tenacious rearguard action. Virtually the entire book could be applied to today's education system.

One surefire sign that this book still strikes a nerve among the liberal elites is its inexcusable exclusion from the Modern Library Top 100 List. Of course, that list includes instead the insipid The City in History (1961) (Lewis Mumford 1895-1990)(see Orrin's review). Mumford's book is mostly self evident historical analysis, devoid of ideas. In sharp contrast, Jacobs' book is all idea, timeless ideas, and a slap in the face of the modern statists of the Left and the enormous hubris which convinces them that they should make our decisions for us.

One thing I especially love about books like Jacobs', is that they remind folks that conservatives aren't merely reactionaries--sniping at noble but misguided social policies only after they've failed--but actually foresaw the catastrophic effect that Big Government would have on our lives and warned against it at the time. On the other hand, it's kind of frightening how much of this book remains timely and germane today; but in recent years it does at least seem as if Jacobs' vision is finally winning. Let us hope so.

GRADE: A-