The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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.

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.