Authors: Jane Jacobs
ISBN-13: 9780679741954, ISBN-10: 067974195X
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Date Published: December 1992
Edition: Reissue
Jane Jacobs was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that has never gone out of print and that has transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, The Nature of Economies and Dark Age Ahead. She died in 2006.
A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.
In this ground-breaking work written over 30 years ago, Jane Jacobs not only threw a monkey wrench into conventional thinking on the structure of cities and helped reshape urban planning, but she did so as a non-expert and as a woman–both historical taboos in the world of intellectual analysis. With flowing, descriptive prose, Jane's work leads us to think about each element of a city–sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy–as a syergistic unit both encompassing structure and going beyond it to the functioning dynamics of our habitats. On a revealing journey through the problems of modern urban centers, artificially engineered to meet political and economic agendas, we arrive at a greater understanding of the intrinsic nature of our cities–as they should be.
1 | Introduction | 3 |
Pt. 1 | The Peculiar Nature of Cities | |
2 | The uses of sidewalks: safety | 29 |
3 | The uses of sidewalks: contact | 55 |
4 | The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children | 74 |
5 | The uses of neighborhood parks | 89 |
6 | The uses of city neighborhoods | 112 |
Pt. 2 | The Conditions for City Diversity | |
7 | The generators of diversity | 143 |
8 | The need for primary mixed uses | 152 |
9 | The need for small blocks | 178 |
10 | The need for aged buildings | 187 |
11 | The need for concentration | 200 |
12 | Some myths about diversity | 222 |
Pt. 3 | Forces of Decline and Regeneration | |
13 | The self-destruction of diversity | 241 |
14 | The curse of border vacuums | 257 |
15 | Unslumming and slumming | 270 |
16 | Gradual money and cataclysmic money | 291 |
Pt. 4 | Different Tactics | |
17 | Subsidizing dwellings | 321 |
18 | Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles | 338 |
19 | Visual order: its limitations and possibilities | 372 |
20 | Salvaging projects | 392 |
21 | Governing and planning districts | 405 |
22 | The kind of problem a city is | 428 |
Index | 449 |