The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library) Review

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library) ReviewThis 1961 book by Jane Jacobs, a one-time writer for architectural magazines in New York City, turned the world of city planning on its head. The author, who possessed no formal training in architecture or city planning, relied on personal observations of her surroundings in Greenwich Village in New York City to supply ammunition for her charges against the grand muftis of the architectural profession. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" consists mostly of common sense observations, but there is also a good amount of statistical information, economics, sociology, and some philosophy at the base of the author's arguments. This 1993 Modern Library reprint seeks to bring Jacobs's work to a whole new generation of readers, a necessity when one realizes that a majority of the problems plaguing cities in 1961 continue to be a problem today.
Jacobs begins her book with a brief history of where modern city planning came from. According to the author, the mess we call cities today emerged from Utopian visionaries from Europe and America beginning in the 19th century. Figures such as Ebenezer Howard, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier, and Daniel Burnham all had a significantly dreadful impact on how urban areas are built and rebuilt. These men all envisioned the city as a dreadful place, full of overcrowding, crime, disease, and ugliness. Howard wished to destroy big cities completely in order to replace them with small towns, or "Garden Cities," made up of small populations. Similar in thought to Howard, Mumford argued for a decentralization of cities into thinned out areas resembling towns. Le Corbusier, says Jacobs, inaugurated yet another harmful plan for cities: the "Radiant City." A radiant city consists of skyscrapers surrounded by wide swaths of parks where vast concentrations of people herded into one area could live and work. Burnham's contribution to planning was "City Monumental," where all of the grand buildings (libraries, government buildings, concert halls, landmarks) of a city could be clustered in one agglomeration separated from the dirty, bad city. Jacobs writes that all of these ideas continue to exert influence on the modern city, and that all of these ideas do not work.
For Jacobs, the key to a successful city rests on one word: diversity. This is not specifically an ethnic diversity, although Jacobs does vaguely include this in her arguments. Rather, diversity means different buildings, different residences, different businesses, and different amounts of people in an area at different times. The antithesis of diversity is what we see today on a stroll through downtown: a bland uniformity of office buildings, apartment dwellings, and houses that stretch as far the eyes can see. In the author's view, this lack of diversification leads to economic stagnation, slums, crime, and a host of other horrors that are all too familiar to viewers of the evening news. Especially egregious to Jacobs is the tendency to isolate low-income people in towering projects surrounded by empty space. The lack of embedded businesses in these areas, along with closed in hallways and elevators (which Jacobs calls "interior sidewalks and streets") creates a breeding ground for criminal elements and bad morale among the residents. Cities that work best employ a wide range of diverse interests that attract, not repel, people. Unfortunately, bureaucrats and social planners always believe top down planning is better than bottom up initiative. Jacobs tries to show the fallacy of social planning.
The amount of ground covered in this book is amazing. The author examines the role and practicality of parks, sidewalks, business interests, city government, streets, automobiles versus pedestrians, and boundaries. Repeatedly, Jacobs discovered fatal errors in how planners build cities. She found parks placed in the sunless shadows of skyscrapers or at the end of dead end streets, narrow sidewalks incapable of carrying heavy foot traffic, city blocks so long that people avoided walking down them, and city governments too fragmented to carry on effective management. All of these things eventually led to abandonment and degradation. Even worse, when a planned section of the city failed the planners came back and razed it to the ground in order to replace it with yet more failure.
One of Jacobs's failings in the book is that she never seems to make the connection between urban planning and social control. The housing projects are a great example. By isolating the poor, blacks as well as whites and other ethnic minorities, the state practices an effective control over these people's lives. This book inspired me to check into the fate of Cabrini-Green, Chicago's notorious housing projects that served as a role model for the abject uselessness of urban planning. These projects are in the process of being razed and replaced by mixed-income houses that, if Jacobs is accurate, may thrive due to the nearby presence of shopping areas and businesses. Of course, the planners are still in the game because they are sending most of the poor residents to other areas of the city.
I am probably not the best person to judge the merits of this book because I have never been to one of Jacobs's "Great Cities." I had difficulty imagining some of the layouts she mentioned in the book due to the simple fact that I have never seen them. Despite this small problem, there is still plenty of information in this book that does make perfect sense. You do not need to live in New York City or Philadelphia to recognize that parks with no sunlight will not be a big hit with the city denizens, or that older buildings are necessary to a neighborhood because they allow small businesses to exist with low overhead costs. "The Death and Life of Great Cities," despite its age, is still a relevant book well worth reading.The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library) Overview

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What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs Review

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What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs ReviewThis book is a collection of essays based loosely on the work of Jane Jacobs (most known for her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, although she wrote numerous other books). Many of the essays are quite unimpressive, stringing together clichés or telling me what I already knew.
However, a few are noteworthy. I was engaged by:
*Ray Suarez's overview of suburban sprawl. Suarez points out that parents often move to suburbia for the benefit of children, but in some ways this experiment has failed, as suburbs "required more adult oversight, not less ... scrubbing the environment of outsiders heightened stranger anxiety rather than alleviating it." (But I question the causal relationship Suarez draws; perhaps stranger anxiety has risen in city adn suburb alike).
*Robert Sirman's essay is one of the better examples of how Jacobs' views can be applied in unfamiliar contexts. Sirman helped expand a ballet school in Toronto; rather than turning the school inward, away from the street, Sirman sought to revitalize the street- for example by supporting a nearby restaurant's attempt to open an outdoor patio, on the grounds that it would provide "eyes on the street" and thus make it seem less deserted.
*Hillary Brown's discussion of how "mixed use" can be applied to unfamiliar contexts- not just putting apartments above shops, but also adding various types of infrastructure together (for example, a Dutch bridge that accommodates not only pedestrian and vehicle traffic, but tramlines and utilities).
*Clare Cooper Marcus's discussion of attempts to combine the advantages of cul-de-sacs with the advantages of grids. (This essay was, however, far too pro-cul-de-sac for my taste, downplaying the reduced walkability of cul-de-sacs by seemingly taking it for granted that children would have no place to walk to outside their own block).
*Saskia Sassen's discussion of regional economic diversity, in which she suggests that cities' economic specializations are deeply rooted in their early 20th-century history, and thus tries to explain why (for example) New York is more dependent on finance than Chicago. (This essay, I thought, could have benefited from more data).
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs Overview

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The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community Review

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The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community ReviewIn the first half of the 1990s, this book culminated the beginning of the most influential postwar stream of thought about American cities and city life, New Urbanism. It was intended to be the coffee-table conversation starter for suburban yups feeling just uncomfortable enough with their time-stressed lives to admit that, yes, their street is bleak, their house a cartoon, their strip-malled "planned community" a joke.
By starting the national conversation, the book has succeeded spectacularly, and continues to serve the purpose. With solid, workmanlike graphic design, it shows the way forward by depicting and decoding a handful of places both designed and built as successful alternatives to suburban sprawl.
Behind the scenes, the book became the flagpole around which a genuinely new intellectual movement rallied. At the time of publication, several of these projects were just on the drawing board. Today, only a few years later, over 150 such projects are blooming nationwide. New Urbanism today is the organizing question in the serious architecture and planning schools, in the development community, and in land-use "smart growth" politics. Developers are either running scared of it, or ripping it off, or putting big money into it. New Urbanism is a powerful set of ideas, and you can find them all here. This is the book that focused the disparate efforts of a score of highly talented, individualistic practitioners into a coherent beam. This is the book with the irrefutable visual argument in favor of building good places to live.
It is good, then, that the book's examples have been outrun. The book appears now almost quaint to those who, on the front lines of the land-use wars, have internalized New Urbanism's basic principles. The book is silent on, for example, the practical, tough, messy, political imperatives needed to reverse a half-century of mad sprawl. Reading "The New Urbanism", one would conclude that healthy places to live are bestowed as if by magic from the brow of one or another luminary planner. A second edition, incorporating successes and lessons learned, will be needed soon. The Playa Vista example in particular appears likely to vanish embarrassingly from the drawing board into the thin air where good ideas go.
However, the basic visual argument remains solid, almost timeless. I use the book constantly to introduce new allies to the cause and to silence critics. I recommend it to anybody interested in America's lousy excuses for cities, which are, after all, our civilization itself.The New Urbanism: Toward an Architecture of Community Overview

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