Anna’s Reviews > The Death and Life of Great American Cities > Status Update
Anna
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Intro
* Jacobs comes out swinging against the urban planning and city design orthodoxies of her day
* Good reminders in here for even nominal Jacobs acolytes- cars can't be treated as the source of urban problems but are a symptom, e.g.,
* Primacy of *function*- how cities work for people vs *appearance*; criticism of "grass, grass, grass" points to difference between park and place-making.
— Oct 13, 2021 06:51PM
* Jacobs comes out swinging against the urban planning and city design orthodoxies of her day
* Good reminders in here for even nominal Jacobs acolytes- cars can't be treated as the source of urban problems but are a symptom, e.g.,
* Primacy of *function*- how cities work for people vs *appearance*; criticism of "grass, grass, grass" points to difference between park and place-making.
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* Hard as a Chicagoan to see Burnham's name invoked less than reverently but she's not wrong
* Much of the difference she's describing here between her approach and contemporaneous planning orthodoxy mirrors the difference between descriptivist and prescriptivist linguistics- whether one is describing the world as it is or normatively suggesting how it ought to be, reality notwithstanding