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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The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 50th Anniversary Edition
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Reviews with images
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
Diego Hernández García
ME LLEVO SUPER MALTRATADO EL LIBRO
Reviewed in Mexico on October 24, 2022
Alaska Bouvet
Should read if you interested in city planning
Reviewed in Sweden on March 11, 2023Alexander Paul
Absolutes Muss für alle Akteure im Städte- und Wohnungsbau
Reviewed in Germany on December 30, 2020
