The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is arguably the most influential book written on urban planning in the 20th century. First published in 1961, the book is a scathing critique of modernist planning policies that Jacobs claims were destroying many existing inner-city communities.
Reserving her most vitriolic criticism for the "rationalist" planners (specifically Robert Moses) of the 1950s and 1960s, she argues that modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to find principles by which to plan cities. Among these policies the most violent was urban renewal; the most prevalent was and is the separation of uses (radically oversimplified: residential, industrial, commercial).
Instead of such policies, which she claims destroy communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces, Jacobs advocates a dense, mixed-use urban aesthetic that preserves the uniqueness inherent in individual neighborhoods. Her aesthetic can be considered opposite to that of the modernists, upholding redundancy and vibrancy, against order and efficiency. She frequently cites New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community. Not coincidentally, this is one of the communities that may very well have been preserved, in part at least, on account of her writing and activism.
The book also played a major role in the urban development of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where Jacobs was involved in the campaign to stop the Spadina Expressway. Toronto, where Jacobs moved in 1968 and lived for the remainder of her life, is to this day regarded as one of the relatively few major metropolises in North America to have successfully maintained a large number of residential neighborhoods in its downtown core, a status which is attributed in part to Jacobs' writing and her local community activism.
The book continues to be Jacobs' most influential, and is still widely read by both planning professionals and the general public. While encouraging Jacobs' early writings, urban theorist Lewis Mumford found fault with her methodology<ref>Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001. Retrieved on 2006-04-23.</ref> in the New York Review of Books. Robert Caro has cited Jacobs' book as the strongest influence on The Power Broker, his biography of Robert Moses.
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The Death and Life of Great American Cities made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Best Books of the Twentieth Century and was #39 on National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century. <references/>
[edit] Bibliography
- [1961] (February 1993) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Modern Library (hardcover), New York: Random House. ISBN 0-6796-0047-7. This edition includes a new foreword written by the author.
