The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Search in google:
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.Ilene Rosoff - WomanSource Catalog & Review: Tools for Connecting the Community for WomenIn 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.
1Introduction3Pt. 1The Peculiar Nature of Cities2The uses of sidewalks: safety293The uses of sidewalks: contact554The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children745The uses of neighborhood parks896The uses of city neighborhoods112Pt. 2The Conditions for City Diversity7The generators of diversity1438The need for primary mixed uses1529The need for small blocks17810The need for aged buildings18711The need for concentration20012Some myths about diversity222Pt. 3Forces of Decline and Regeneration13The self-destruction of diversity24114The curse of border vacuums25715Unslumming and slumming27016Gradual money and cataclysmic money291Pt. 4Different Tactics17Subsidizing dwellings32118Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles33819Visual order: its limitations and possibilities37220Salvaging projects39221Governing and planning districts40522The kind of problem a city is428Index449
