MIDAS

HUMAN SETTLEMENTS
AND PLANNING
REVIEW OF BOOK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GREAT AMERICAN
CITIES by JANE JACOBS
ASSIGNMENT

SANDHYA K
REG NO: 311212251055
B.ARCH -V YEAR

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GREAT

AMERICAN CITIES- Jane Jacobs
INTRODUCTION
Jacob covers a lot of materials in the life and death of great American cities, but one
of the successes of this book is how well it introduces the unique dynamics of cities
to someone without any background about urban planning. She tackles the less
conscious and more emotional reactions concisely and effectively. Jacobs' book is an
attack on orthodox modern city planning and city architectural design. Looking into
how cities actually work, rather than how they should work according to urban
designers and planners, Jacobs effectively describes the real factors affecting cities,
and recommends strategies to enhance actual city performance.
REVIEW
Jacobs saw the principles that underlie city planning as erroneous and detrimental to
cities. Small businesses are ruined and families become uprootedJacobs cites
expressway construction as one factor.
A banker may consider a particular area to be a slum; however, it may actually be a
thriving neighborhood. Banks refuse to give out loans to such areas, so the vibrancy
of the neighborhood is a result of community interaction. Planners are more
concerned with automobilesthey see cars as both a cause of city decay and a
needed commodity. Jacobs see cars as a symptom of city problems, not the source.
Jacobs wants to introduce new principles in city planning.
Part 1 examines city problems, using sidewalks and parks as metaphors
Part 2 studies the economics behind city problems.
Part 3 emphasizes decay along with regeneration (Slumming and Unslumming
a term Jacobs invents).
Part 4 is where Jacobs makes suggestions for change in existing cities and
different planning for new ones.
Jacobs looks to inner-cities for her main observations.
Reserving her most vitriolic criticism for the "rationalist" planners (specifically Robert
Moses) of the 1950s and 1960s, Jacobs argued that modernist urban planning rejects
the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by
layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive
1

reasoning to find principles by which to plan cities. Among these policies she
considered urban renewal the most violent, and separation of uses (i.e., residential,
industrial, commercial) the most prevalent. These policies, she claimed, destroy
communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces.
In their place Jacobs advocated "four generators of diversity" that "create effective
economic pools of use"
Mixed primary uses, activating streets at different times of the day
Short blocks, allowing high pedestrian permeability
Buildings of various ages and states of repair
Her aesthetic can be considered opposite to that of the modernists, upholding
redundancy and vibrancy against order and efficiency. She frequently cites New York
City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community. The Village,
like many similar communities, may well have been preserved, at least in part, by
her writing and activism. The book also played a major role in slowing the urban
redevelopment of Toronto, Canada, where Jacobs was involved in the campaign to
stop the Spadina Expressway.
CRITICISM OF ORTHODOX URBANISM
Jane Jacobs agrees that the ideology behind garden cities and decentrists appropriate
for their contexts of suburban automobile loving persons who are driven towards
privacy, yet to accept as an inextricable part of mainstream academic and political
consensus on how to design cities themselves, thus influencing legislations, housing,
mortgage, financing, urban renewal due to their anti- urban biases is claimed as
impractical and detached from actual existing cities leading to quicker urban demise.
CONCLUSION
The book continues to be Jacobs' most influential, and is still widely read by both
planning professionals and the general public. A great book, like a great man, "is a
strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of its greatness consists in being
there." For all its weaknesses, Jane Jacobs has written such a book. Readers will
vehemently agree and disagree with the views; but few of them will go through the
volume without looking at their streets and neighborhoods a little differently, a little
more sensitively. After all, it is the widespread lack of such sensitivity, especially
among those who matter, which is perhaps what is most wrong with our cities today.