The Death and Life of Great American Cities

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities

4.3 of 5 stars 4.30 · rating details · 4,161 ratings · 468 reviews

This book is an attack on current methods of city planning and re-building. It is also an explanation of new principles and an argument for different methods from those now in use. It is the first real alternative to conventional city planning that we have had in this century. Its author, herself a city dweller and an editor of Architectural Forum, is direct and practical...more This book is an attack on current methods of city planning and re-building. It is also an explanation of new principles and an argument for different methods from those now in use. It is the first real alternative to conventional city planning that we have had in this century. Its author, herself a city dweller and an editor of Architectural Forum, is direct and practical in her approach. What, she asks, makes cities work? Why are some neighborhoods full of things to do and see and why are others dull? Why does the crime rate soar in our public housing developments and why are some of our older neighborhoods, despite their evident pov-erty, so much more safe, stable and congenial? Why do some neighborhoods attract interested and responsible populations and why do others degenerate? Why are Boston's North End and the eastern and western extremes of Greenwich Village good neighborhoods and why do orthodox city planners consider them slums? What alternatives are there to current city planning and rebuilding?

Conventional city planning holds that cities decline because they are blighted by too many people, by mixtures of commercial, industrial and residential uses, by old buildings and narrow streets and by small landholders who stand in the way of large-scale development. Such neighborhoods, they insist, breed apathy and crime, discourage investment and contaminate the areas around them. The response of con-ventional city planning is to tear them down, scatter their inhabitants, lay out super-blocks, and rebuild the area accord-ing to an integrated plan, with the result, as often as not, that the crime rate rises still higher, the new neighborhood is more lifeless than the old one, and the surrounding areas deteriorate even more, until the life of the whole city is threatened.

But Mrs. Jacobs observes that in any number of cases these very conditions--mixed uses, dense population, old buildings, small blocks, decentralized ownership--create the very opposite of slums, neighborhoods that regenerate themselves spontaneously, that are full of variety and diversity, that attract large numbers of casual visitors and responsible new residents, that encourage investment and revitalize the areas around them. Boston's North End (condemned as a slum by or-thodox planners) is such a neighborhood, and so is Greenwich Village. Rittenhouse Square and Telegraph Hill are others. Nearly every large city can produce still other examples.

Why then do some city neighborhoods die and why do others flourish? And what can city planners do to avoid the death and encourage the life of our great American cities? The solutions proposed by Mrs. Jacobs in this book represent a sharp break with conventional thinking on the subject and they carry with them the ring of simple truth which marks this book as an inevitable classic of social thought.

This edition is set from the first American edition of 1961 and commemorates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Random House.(less)

Hardcover, 472 pages

Published September 10th 2002 by Random House (first published 1961)

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

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Dec 04, 2008 Siler rated it 4 of 5 stars

An urban classic that remains applicable.
Jacobs makes a strong case and repeats it over and over.

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Dec 26, 2008 Samantha Brockfield is currently reading it

Jane Jacobs is brilliant. Her insights on urban planning are both practical and exciting.

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Sep 24, 2007 Katy rated it 3 of 5 stars

I know some people who will balk at my 3-star rating, so I will explain myself. As a body of work, it is amazing and I adore Jane Jacobs. However, a good portion of this book still manages to be dull, despite being very important. (I can't help it!) I dig nonfiction, and I think 3 stars for a non-fiction book means it's pretty darn good, because who ever finished a cruddy non-fiction book unless they were taking a class? So, I read it voluntarily and give it 3 stars on the highly-sensitive and m...more

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Jan 25, 2009 Matt rated it 5 of 5 stars

Favorite passages:

To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: The distrct must serve more than one purpose (preferably more than two), the blocks must be short, the buildings must vary in age and condition, and the population must be dense.

Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, which used to be considered by many critics one of the most beautiful of American avenues (it was, in those days, essentially a suburban avenue of large, fine houses with lar...more Favorite passages:

To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: The distrct must serve more than one purpose (preferably more than two), the blocks must be short, the buildings must vary in age and condition, and the population must be dense.

Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, which used to be considered by many critics one of the most beautiful of American avenues (it was, in those days, essentially a suburban avenue of large, fine houses with large, fine grounds), has now been excoriated, with justice… as one of the ugliest and most disorganized of city streets. In converting to outright urban use, Euclid Avenue has converted to homogeneity: office buildings again, and again a chaos of shouted, but superficial, differences. (p. 226)

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves. Wherever people are thinly settled, rather than densely concentrated, or wherever diverse uses occur infrequently, any specific attraction does cause traffic congestion… this is tolerable where the population is thinly spread. It becomes an intolerable condition, destructive of all other values and all other aspects of convenience, where populations are heavy or continuous. (p. 230)

… Credit-blacklist maps are identical, both in conception and in most results, with municipal slum-clearance maps. And municipal slum-clearance maps are regarded as responsible devices, used for responsible purposes - among their purposes is, in fact, that of warning lenders not to invest here… Credit-blacklist maps, like slum-clearance maps, are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies. (p. 300)

… there is a basic aesthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art… we need art most, perhaps, to reassure us of our own humanity. However, although art and life are interwoven, they are not the same things. Confusion between them is, in part, why efforts at city design are so disappointing. (p. 372)

What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? What if we are prevented from catalyzing workable and vital cities because the practical steps needed to do so are in conflict with the practical steps demanded by erosion?… In that case we Americans will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millenia: What is the purpose of life? For us, theanswer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable: The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles. (p. 370)
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May 23, 2013 Jim Dressner rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: non-fiction

Rightfully deserving it status as a classic, be prepared for this book to challenge some of your positions and stimulate new ideas--pretty good for a book over 50 years old! Key insights for me (so far) are the need for clear private/public boundaries, the role of repeated public interactions in building up a neighborhood, reasons for parks to be successful or unsuccessful. I wonder how different the book would be if it were written now; can 1950s urban street life exist now, competing against T...more

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Jul 05, 2012 Chris Ledermuller rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: urbanism, nonfiction

This is the first book that brought Jane Jacobs to prominence, helped establish her career of electic, observational writings, and most importantly, it is a transformational piece.

Published in the early 1960s, she had given the first voice to the voiceless city that was only being silenced as history progressed. "Death and Life" made its intentions clear: It was an attack on the very notion of urban planning. Jacobs stepped up against what the conventional wisdom of her time thought was done in...more This is the first book that brought Jane Jacobs to prominence, helped establish her career of electic, observational writings, and most importantly, it is a transformational piece.

Published in the early 1960s, she had given the first voice to the voiceless city that was only being silenced as history progressed. "Death and Life" made its intentions clear: It was an attack on the very notion of urban planning. Jacobs stepped up against what the conventional wisdom of her time thought was done in the name of progress. She focused on the neighborhood as the basic functioning unit of a city, and dared to tell experts they were wrong about notions of slums and civic obsolescence. It would take another two generations, at least, before "Death and Life" had been proven right.

The elements of a great neighborhood: a constant mix of people on, or looking toward, the street; a mix of business functions so as to invite people out at various times of the day; short neighborhood blocks to make walking pleasant; and the need for older buildings and low costs of entry for new businesses.

This is antithetical to most contemporary notions of planning. Cities tend to enforce zoning strictly and keep residential and business uses far apart. Cities placed an emphasis on the private sphere while leaving the public realm to squalor and dereliction. The separation of land uses mean entire neighborhoods sit inactive during a large part of the day. Longer blocks theoretically make automobile throughput convenient but deter walking. Older buildings are seen as a blight that attract low-class tenants and are targets for redevelopment; never mind what happens to residential and business tenants of these areas.

Jacobs went unheeded for much of her adult life. "Death and Life" was an extended response to plans by Robert Moses to run highways through Manhattan, and in particular, her neighborhood, Greenwich Village. She and her neighbors fought hard and ultimately prevailed in preventing the highway from being built, but ultimately, suburbanism and later exurbanism continued apace and the slow decay of center cities continued for decades.

Jacobs would go on to leave the U.S. and find a similar "Jacobsean" neighborhood in Toronto. Greenwich Village would become so trendy that Jacobs herself would have been priced out of it even with any book royalties, speaking fees or other honoraria she might have received. She managed to spur interest in urban affairs, but ironically, the profile of urban planning gained stature. Jacobs would have hated that development, especially considering how many planners tried to synthesize a "Death and Life"-looking community without asking anything from suburbanites to adapt.

Yet a funny thing happened. Cities, after being left to rot for decades, started bouncing back. It wasn't a New York phenomenon alone, though it started there. You see the same urban rediscovery in all parts of the U.S. Some of it is people-driven. Jacobs had always stressed the importance of people, more than geography or institutions, to shape the city's economic and social direction. Nowadays, the castoffs of formerly great cities offer a frontier to be reclaimed. Parts of it, though, are event-driven. The collapse of the housing market, coupled with the costs of operating and accommodating automobiles, helped to raise the profile of cities. Also, as communications and economics have made people as part of a global village, communications and economics did not spread across benefits equally. Cities, as Richard Florida says, are "spiky," or advantages tend to concentrate in already advantaged areas.

To see how your city rose, fell and rose again, or rose, fell and stayed there, "Death and Life" is a must-read because it shows the reader what they ought to look at -- people and places that are hidden in plain sight.(less)

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Jun 22, 2012 Ryan Holiday rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is one of the most important books about cities ever written. It's what helps you understand why cities work, why they don't work, what makes a neighborhood, what destroys neighborhoods and how almost everything city planners and governments think matters, doesn't. Seth Roberts is probably the biggest Jane Jacobs fan there is. He's what she calls an insider-outsider (insider in terms of understanding, outsider in terms of career). She was an activist and a student who understood the system...more

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Apr 16, 2012 Honza rated it 4 of 5 stars

A little dull and very sad summary of what was wrong with the second half of the 20th century. Jacobs successfully manages to describe desirable attributes that a modern city should have, but doesn't try to retain or regain them. It is almost unbelievable that the book was published in 1961, because there is nothing in it that you can't see outside of your own window, right now. You see neighborhoods more and more separated by income and social status, diversity degenerating into inequality and...more

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Nov 20, 2011 Marks54 rated it 5 of 5 stars

I had heard of this book before, but had not gotten around to reading it. I decided to after reading references to it in "The Great Reset" by Richard Florida. This is a stunning and thought-provoking book that I could not put down. While it is fifty years old this year, the ideas are still fresh, although the details of the cities discussed have certainly changed.

This book is an attack on the classic central planning view of urban planning and development. Jacobs espouses the view of city as org...more

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Jul 03, 2011 Andrea rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: theory, public_space

One of the books that all planners are supposed to have read, I know it's a bit shocking that I have only now read it. And regrettable. It deserves every ounce of it's status as a classic (if such status were to be measured in ounces). It's eminently readable (and isn't that a pleasure in a book of this kind), but also incredibly insightful and of course I love how it resonates so brilliantly with my experience living in many different cities while toppling most accepted planning theory. The mor...more One of the books that all planners are supposed to have read, I know it's a bit shocking that I have only now read it. And regrettable. It deserves every ounce of it's status as a classic (if such status were to be measured in ounces). It's eminently readable (and isn't that a pleasure in a book of this kind), but also incredibly insightful and of course I love how it resonates so brilliantly with my experience living in many different cities while toppling most accepted planning theory. The more diverse cities are, the more people love them. The more people on the street at all different times of day, the safer and more enjoyable those streets are. High foot traffic allows a glorious flowering in the kinds of local businesses to spring up, and those in turn provide stability and attraction to the street. The longer people stay in neighborhoods and the more they feel pride and ownership and love for them, the better those neighborhoods become. It's brilliant to be able to walk out of your door and buy what you need within a few blocks, getting to know the shop owners as you do so. Kids growing up in this environment feel a sense of civic engagement and helpfulness, and are accountable and supervised by a multitude of friendly and known adults. And who could know better the improvements and changes needed for a neighborhood than those who live there?

And yet planning over decades has worked to destroy all this.

This is a practical and eminently sensible account of what makes city neighbourhoods work. I think its weaknesses are highlighted by the fact that it is a rare popular book read by those who are not planners, and accepted as a classic amongst urban planners themselves, and yet, although written in 1961, has had remarkably little effect on how planning occurs or how urban development takes place. This points to the questions that Jacobs answers only superficially -- why exactly planning and development have taken the shape they have. That is truly a tragedy for it is full of brilliant and insightfully practical suggestions on how to improve both. It does look at the process of redlining, it has some analysis of racism and classism and prejudice, but not enough. And ultimately the driving forces of profit and capitalism are left unquestioned. To find those you have read David Harvey and Neil Smith and a host of others. I don't think that makes the insight offered by Jacobs any less, simply incomplete, and highlights the fact that a more fundamental change in how we develop and plan our cities is required, one based upon need and increasing vitality rather than the greatest profit.
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Apr 05, 2010 Alan rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: City planners and suchlike wannabes

Recommended to Alan by: Jo Walton, though indirectly

Savage, brilliant, and brilliantly savage, this scathing indictment of sterile and soulless city planning remains, sadly, as relevant today as when it was written, some 50 years ago. Jacobs pulls no punches whatsoever when she's dissecting problems in the Bronx, in the works of Le Corbusier and Lewis Mumford, with the pernicious effects that automobiles have on living cities, or in the general case of urban renewal and the single-use, single-aged "neighborhood," about which she says,

"It is dead.

...more

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Nov 20, 2011 Mike Edwards rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: philosophy, pop-social-science, usa

When I first read it, I knew very little about Jane Jacobs or urban planning--and I was completely blown away by this book. I've always intuitively felt drawn to walking neighborhoods and tight-knit communities; I can even remember my grandmother telling me stories of how they used to walk to the big department stores in downtown Dallas when she was young. And yet the cities I grew up in were mostly spread-out, suburban areas dominated by over-crowded expressways, and where living near the city...more

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Dec 09, 2010 Apio rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: cultural-analysis, urban-studies

Of course, ultimately I want to do away with the city. It represents the values of civilization which boil down to alienated and centralized power and wealth. Yet there are aspects of the city that I enjoy, particularly the opportunity for chance encounters with stimulating strangers. Where human beings do not congregate in large numbers, the opportunities for such encounters are much reduced or even disappear. But contemporary cities are built to serve the needs of capitalism and the state. And...more

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Jun 12, 2010 Jeremy added it

Shelves: sociological

I've never read anything about city planning or urban studies before, so this was all quite new to me. Jacobs creates a vivid, wide ranging critique of the dominant forms of city planning, which are driven as she compellingly points out, by stupidly reactionary, romantic notions about how people should be made to live. I'd never really thought in a concerted way before about how things like sidewalk width, the ages of buildings, the the location of public buildings etc. would effect how people m...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Jose-rodrigo Hernandez rated it 5 of 5 stars

I read a criticism of Jacobs recently saying she was wrong about older housing stock and how prices don't drop and become affordable because of age. I love this book but I think about that criticism a lot considering the age, location and cost of where I live. Her description of the corner store owner being someone you are friendly and interact with but is not really your friend is so spot on. I was fairly friendly with a neighbor in my old apartment until one day I decided to invite him upstair...more

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Nov 03, 2012 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-that-changed-my-perspective

Ever wonder why most of our "Civic Centers" in North America are "avoided by everyone but bums, who have fewer choices of loitering place than others?" You already know the answer, and The Death and Life of American Cities will reacquaint you with it.

Fixing fundamental mistakes that we overlook every day starts with seeing them. It's a masterpiece of common sense.

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Sep 16, 2010 Emily rated it 4 of 5 stars

It took a few months, but I finally finished this book. I'm glad I did. This is a great book (like, capital-G great) because you think about its ideas after you've put the book down. You'll look at cities in a new way. Some things about the book that aren't so great: This book was written in the 1960s, so a lot of the examples are outdated or no longer relevant. And while Jane Jacobs thinks we don't need illustrations ("They're all around you!"), they would have been extremely helpful, especiall...more

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Jul 31, 2011 AJ Conroy marked it as to-read

From ABA's 30 books every lawyer should read: Neal Katyal, director of the Center on National Security and the Law at Georgetown University Law School, recently stepped down as the United States’ acting solicitor general. A professor at Georgetown University, he was the lead counsel for the Guantanamo Bay detainees in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. In that case, the U.S. Supreme Court found that military commissions to try detainees violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice and four Geneva Conventions....more

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Dec 08, 2009 Phil rated it 4 of 5 stars

Though it is somewhat dated, I still found it helpful in understanding what can contribute to and detract from city vitality, and what leads to what Jacobs calls "The Great Blight of Dullness" which can be found in many cities (and probably all suburbs). She discusses what makes city streets successful as places where people spend time, what contributes to dead areas where people (and then businesses) avoid, housing issues, transportation issues, political forces in cities, etc. She draws mostly...more

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Nov 22, 2009 Pam rated it 4 of 5 stars

This took me a while to read because it was easy to put down. This book is famous for being one of the first sources of critique of American city planning, and many of her arguments seem to hold water even today. This said, I constantly asked myself "where is the science?" while reading this. I wonder if it had been published in this decade, would she be allowed to draw so many conclusions based almost entirely on personal observation and opinion. My assessment of this book mirrors my judgment o...more

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Feb 13, 2013 John Connolly rated it 5 of 5 stars

Jane Jacobs is the Edmund Burke of urban planning. I doubt there's any compliment higher than that. In Death and Life she takes on the modernist planners and their grand projects, visions of 'urban renewal' and single-use neighborhoods, that she says create uneconomical, unnatural, isolated and deadening urban spaces.

Jacobs instead champions four factors that generate not only vibrancy, but economic viability.

1. Mixed uses, with different street activities at different times of the day
2. Short b...more

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Sep 11, 2011 Noah rated it 3 of 5 stars

Very interesting book, but not very well written and drags on for about 200 pages more than it needs to. It's supposed to be one of the great books in urban planning, written in 1960s Greenwich Village, so I expected a tome to central planning, and was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be relatively libertarian. The author criticizes the urban planning ideology of the day, responsible for housing projects and garden cities, and based on the belief that residential areas need to be solel...more

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Mar 05, 2011 Mia rated it 4 of 5 stars

A must-read in the canon of urban planning literature, Jacobs crafts an appealing vision of urban life. That is, until the realization that not every neighborhood is as equipped to fight encroachments of highways, sanitation facilities, and characterless open spaces as NYC's Greenwich Village was (and is). A good counterbalance to this book is Flint's account of Jacobs' battle with Robert Moses, king of the parkway and unilateral decision-making. It paints Jacobs in an even light and while laudi...more

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Mar 02, 2011 Alice rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-books, urban-ideas

This book is seriously one of the most amazing works of non-fiction ever written. It's slow-going (I spent about a month on it) but entirely worth every page. Even if you're not obsessed with urban planning (I'm putting the bias out in the open), I still think that you will be hard pressed to find a work of non-fiction this good that has kept its relevance and applications fifty years later.

Jane Jacobs writes passionately about how to improve cities, how to look at cities, and how to destroy ci...more

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Mar 13, 2012 Anne Willkomm rated it 3 of 5 stars

Jacobs is a little repetitive. I sometimes feel that she could have written in one chapter what she takes to write in five. That being said, I wasn't sure my students would like Jacobs. They certainly jumped on the fact that she was neither trained via her education in urban planning, nor did she work as an urban planner. One student, however, found her own voice through Jacobs. This student had been told she wrote too conversationally in high school. She could see her issues, but was unable to...more

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Dec 04, 2009 Catherine Kealhofer rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I'm still somewhere in the middle of this book. This is a classic on urban planning written by someone who was an outsider and sought to question conventional wisdom. Jacobs is an entertaining and opinionated writer, with some nice observations of how city neighborhoods work and how life in the city is influenced by the style of development. (It's quite fun to match her observations to your own experience of cities-- which types of neighborhood feel safe, where you choose to spend your time, etc...more

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Mar 22, 2011 Jeff rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american-studies

I particularly enjoyed her descriptions of the “social structure of sidewalk life” and the focus on the people who create the “ballet of Hudson Street” and other neighborhoods. She details the characters, the residents, not as abstract forms or statistics, but as the personalities all interacting that make up a neighborhood –and that make it work. I liked how she provided support for her arguments by interweaving them in a “story like” manner – for instance instead of throwing a bunch of statist...more

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Mar 06, 2012 Aaron rated it 3 of 5 stars

A really cool take on alternative city planning strategies...or at least alternative to the methods used 50 years ago. All that said, as a reader with interest in but not necessarily knowledge of the topic, time constraints didn't really do much to hinder my appreciation of this text.

I did find Jacobs to be a bit repetitive. While she uses a breadth of examples, the themes seem to be pounded into submission. The vocabulary all starts to blend together, and pretty soon I can't keep the different...more

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Nov 19, 2012 Rob rated it 3 of 5 stars

A seminal book in the history of urban studies, we have Jane Jacobs to thank that our cities were not further ravaged by thundering expressways, grim tower blocks and chain restaurants than they already are. Her influence helped halt the dystopian planning impulse of Robert Moses and others. If only the creators of Harlow or Stevenage had listened.

But the book, important as it is, does suffer from being very repetitive and extremely hectoring. I lost count of the number of times Jacobs calls for...more

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May 29, 2012 Bennievermeer added it

Some of the specific tactics Jane Jacobs describes in her seminal work on urban planning, 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' (1961), may be outdated half a century later. But what hasn't aged at all is the power of her observations - sharp, down to earth and openminded - about the intricate workings of the city.

A great example is the way Jacobs defines a city neighborhood, as opposed to a village or small town neighborhood. One of the defining characteristics of a city, she observes,...more

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About Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, OC, O.Ont (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-born Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to inf...more

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“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” — 41 people liked it

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” — 12 people liked it

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