The Death and Life of Great American CitiesThirty years after its publication, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was described by "The New York Times" as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....ŬIt ̈ can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition. |
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administrative architectural attrition automobiles Avenue Back-of-the-Yards become big cities blocks borders Brooklyn cars cataclysmic Chatham Village choice city districts city diversity city neighborhoods city planning city streets city's complexity cross-use cultural downtown dwelling densities East Harlem economic economic rent effective enterprises example functional Garden City gray areas Greenwich Village ground housing projects idea intensity kind lack land landmarks Le Corbusier live Lower East Side Manhattan means ment metropolitan mixture neighbor neighborhood parks North End old buildings organization overcrowding pedestrian physical planners population primary problem public housing Radiant City reason rent residential residents restaurants Rittenhouse Square Sara Delano Roosevelt sidewalk Skid Row slum social space Square street neighborhoods Stuyvesant Town subsidy suburban suburbs successful tactics tenants things tion town traffic understand unslumming users visual vitality York zoning