Even as software’s purchase value is being driven dramatically down, its social value seems to be going dramatically up. We can’t live without software anymore, but we also don’t want to pay for it. How is this the case? The author Jane Jacobs explores these conflicting views in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in which she tries to explain why urban planning policy failed cities. Jacobs’s major critique of urban planning in the 1950s is that the planners treated cities—the layout of their buildings, parks, and roads—as static objects, which were only developed at the
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