1961 uber-classic of urban analysis which uses common sense observations to describe what makes cities work--or not.

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Product Description

Thirty 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....[It] 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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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15977 in Books
• Published on: 1993-02-09
• Released on: 1993-02-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 624 pages

Review
"The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense."
—Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times

"One of the most remarkable books ever written about the city... a primary work. The research apparatus is not pretentious—it is the eye and the heart—but it has given us a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city."
—William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Review
"The liveliness of her mind is a joy to behold, as is her common sense and a prose style uncluttered with the litter of empty jargon...her book is well and timely met." - The Globe and Mail


"This is vintage Jane Jacobs: quietly authoritative, profoundly accessible, and disdainful of the blinkered viewpoints of academic theorists." - The Calgary Herald


"Witty, beautifully written--the culmination of Jacobs' previous thinking, and a step forward that deftly invokes a broader philosophical, even metaphysical, context." - Publishers Weekly


"Jane Jacobs has become more than a person. She is an adjective." - Toronto Life


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From The WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for Women; review by Ilene Rosoff
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 synergistic 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.

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Customer Reviews

Read it!
Still relevant, still useful....and still ignored by the common city engineer. Our city's planners need to re-read this sucker.

Read it
This is a book that relates to designers, and city planners as well as the "un-educated". Reading this book will certainly inform one on the purpose and importance of city planning.

It'll make a city slicker out of the most ardent farm boy
This book will give you a reason to want to go visit the city, or to go out and get into the city you already live in. Her reference to the "ballet of the sidewalks" gives a whole new twist to what is going on in a busy downtown. City planners, take note!