Jane Jacobs

The death and life of great American cities

by Jane Jacobs  · 1 Nov 1961

The DEATH and LIFE of GREAT AMERICAN CITIES Jane Jacobs Jane Jacobs was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and now lives in Toronto. In addition to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she is the author

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of Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Question of Separatism, The Economy of Cities, and, most recently, Systems of Survival. ALSO BY Jane Jacobs Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundation of Commerce and Politics Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life The Question

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of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty The Economy of Cities VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, DECEMBER 1992 Copyright © 1961 by Jane Jacobs Copyright renewed 1989 by Jane Jacobs All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House

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University Forum, Harper’s Magazine, The Reporter. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacobs, Jane, 1916– The death and life of great American cities / Jane Jacobs.—1st Vintage Books ed. p cm Originally published: New York: Random House, [1961] ISBN 0-679-74195-X 1 City planning—United States 2 Urban

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H. Jacobs, Jr.; by this time I do not know which ideas in this book are mine and which are his. JANE JACOBS Contents Cover About the Author Also by Jane Jacobs Title Page Copyright Dedication Acknowledgment Illustrations Epigraph 1 Introduction Part One THE PECULIAR NATURE OF CITIES 2 The uses of sidewalks: safety

A Short History of British Architecture: From Stonehenge to the Shard

by Simon Jenkins  · 7 Nov 2024  · 364pp  · 94,801 words

2020s that they were priced second only to the City of London per square foot. Given the frequency of conference references to the American urbanologist Jane Jacobs and her Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), this neglect of the complexity of a modern city was puzzling. To Jacobs, streets were

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of a streetscape of terraces, modern in style but traditional in plan. The streets were not wide and were overlooked by front doors and windows, Jane Jacobs’s ‘eyes in the street’. By Mikhail Riches and Cathy Hawley, Goldsmith Street was a true attempt to recapture the virtues of neighbourhood architecture. This

The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity

by Tim Wu  · 4 Nov 2025  · 246pp  · 65,143 words

same physical store that once sold buggy whips and typewriters might now repair damaged phones and sell bubble tea. The same infrastructure supports evolving uses. Jane Jacobs, the great prophet of the city economy, made much of this fact in her books, including The Death and Life of Great American Cities and

Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile

by Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon and Aaron Naparstek  · 21 Oct 2025  · 330pp  · 85,349 words

revolts,” communities across the country did what they could to stop the expansion of roads that they rightly believed would destroy cities. Urbanist and writer Jane Jacobs and other activists in Greenwich Village went head to head with New York’s master builder Robert Moses, fighting his plan to demolish large swaths

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love affair, one that changed our whole way of life.” The phrase became part of the popular lexicon almost overnight. Produced the same year that Jane Jacobs published her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and airing just as the highway revolts were gaining steam, Groucho’s hyping

City Limits: Infrastructure, Inequality, and the Future of America's Highways

by Megan Kimble  · 2 Apr 2024  · 430pp  · 117,211 words

Movement Against Destruction successfully killed an east-west expressway that would have demolished twenty-eight thousand housing units. In New York City, a writer named Jane Jacobs stopped a planner named Robert Moses from building a four-lane road through Washington Square Park. In Austin, city leaders approved a plan in 1962

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City

by Richard Sennett  · 9 Apr 2018

, Long Island City. (Clarence S. Stein Papers, Cornell University Library) 15. Greenwich Village on the Fourth of July weekend in 2016. (Ryan DeBerardinis/Shutterstock) 16. Jane Jacobs at the White Horse Tavern in the 1960s. (Cervin Robinson) 17. Nehru Place in Delhi, India. (Richard Sennett) 18. High-rise apartment buildings on the

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succeeded, people would have had to learn how to adapt the hard surfaces accommodating the school’s buses as playgrounds when the buses were absent. Jane Jacobs combined all these views. The great writer-warrior did not dispute the worth of urban design itself, but asserted that urban forms emerged slowly and

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. are all red flags, inspiring even more assertion. A maker who approaches his or her labours in a spirit of modesty, as Gordon Cullen or Jane Jacobs want, will certainly reduce the tension between making and dwelling. Yet he or she may avoid taking risks. If the immodest, assertive, creative will is

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which became official urbanism focused on making the ville work as a self-contained problem.15, 16 Two voices were raised against the prevailing mood. Jane Jacobs, then a youngish writer for architectural magazines, attended the event, and found the assembled dignitaries depressing in their self-confidence. Lewis Mumford was the event

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the Harvard meeting, Mumford and Jacobs parted ways, bitterly, over how to achieve this goal. III. HOW THEN TO OPEN THE CITY? – LEWIS MUMFORD DEBATES JANE JACOBS Jane Jacobs became famous as an activist for the campaign she waged against Robert Moses, the dictatorial planner of much of twentieth-century New York who wanted

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between the built and the lived, ville and cité. Mumford credited the urbanist as central planner with a much greater political virtue than did Jacobs. Jane Jacobs embodied her urbanism, at least as I knew her. (Introduced by our mutual editor Jason Epstein, I knew her casually during the time she lived

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by the conviction that he had not been given the recognition he deserved, even though by the 1950s he was in fact a famous writer. Jane Jacobs was his particular bête noire; he first tried to stop publication of her book, then wrote a condescending review of it in the New Yorker

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, school and shop; garden cities would heal the breach between ville and cité, opening up a good life for all. * * * Jacobs Some commentators believe that Jane Jacobs’ emphasis on casual, informal exchanges in the street, or on unregulated processes of urban development, are examples of liquid modernity. Not at all. She advocates

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strikes’ – are gestures of protest which let off steam but seldom effect lasting change. So too is wild-cat urbanism. This criticism is unfair to Jane Jacobs; her bottom-up protests stopped Robert Moses from turning the centre of New York into a highway. Still, about Jacobs’ celebration of disorder Mumford cuts

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this top-down way to deal with the millions of vehicle trips circulating in and around the new city.21 This kind of calculation is Jane Jacobs’ Achilles heel. She has no good idea of how to scale up from the local to the urban. It won’t do to call, as

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divided Chicago from Paris debouched as a conflict between New Yorkers about whether a city can be made open, by design. * * * I once remarked to Jane Jacobs, when I was first trying to work out the relation of cité and ville, that she was better on the cité than Mumford, while he

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. This was not while their quarrel simmered in New York, but later, after the Vietnam years when she and her family left for wintry Toronto. Jane Jacobs was strong spice in her placid Canadian home; she remained so even after she became physically immobile. We became friendly in the way New Yorkers

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remember, asking me, ‘So what would you do?’ PART TWO The Difficulty of Dwelling 4 Klee’s Angel Leaves Europe I had no answer to Jane Jacobs. Indeed, though I argued with her, she seemed to fill up my imagination and speak for my sentiments, as for many other young urbanists. In

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; once they had disappeared, the pavement-dwellers bedded down again – as the police knew perfectly well they would. This mixed scene does not quite evoke Jane Jacobs’ West Village because, though loose and micro-scale in the character of its daily life, Nehru Place came into being thanks to large-scale, careful

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this way. In Mexico City, São Paulo, Lagos, Shanghai and Delhi, people arrive as in a flash-flood, rather than in the slow, gradual increase Jane Jacobs thought was good for cities. The sheer size of these flash-flooded cities indeed marks a break from Europe and North America. United Nations demographers

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of money and power, difficult to address locally: rather than face down Robert Moses, a tangible human being who actually lived in New York, today Jane Jacobs might have to send emails of protest to an investment committee in Qatar. All of these forces combine to threaten Mr Sudhir. Informal local places

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nor profitable.25) Madame Q doubted, indeed, that much Western thinking made good sense of China’s cities. I once gave her a copy of Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities to read, thinking she would approve of it. She didn’t. The great American champion of small

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neighbourhoods, of slow growth and of bottom-up politics was too ‘American’. Slow growth is only for rich countries. Moreover, Madame Q thought Jane Jacobs naive about spontaneity, which to her meant roving bands of Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution. Lewis Mumford made more sense to her. Like him

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ghettos. IV. MIXING – THE MASK OF CIVILITY Where I live in London may seem to qualify as the sort of iconic mixed neighbourhood celebrated by Jane Jacobs. Here lies Saffron Hill, once the setting of abject poverty in Dickens’s Bleak House, later a street of Italian-owned warehouses and offices. About

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in the housing estate disappeared. Yiddish grunts of greeting and the reappearance of the Palestinian flags signalled the crisis was over. The little courtesy embodies Jane Jacobs’ precept that ‘superficiality is no vice’. You ask how a neighbour is doing without really wanting to know; you are merely sending a signal of

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York present and future, odd-angled corridors similarly stream employees towards intersections where the casual collisions will happen.8 All of which seems to evoke Jane Jacobs. Indeed, the New York Googleplex is located just above the streets in Greenwich Village she wrote about; at first glance it looks to be filled

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not require, changes. Something like this system is now installed in over 250 other Brazilian cities.32, 33 One of Lewis Mumford’s criticisms of Jane Jacobs was that you cannot built up scale in a city, in its ville, by local action in the city. The Brazilian experience is a way

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’s experience: fast-track growth on the Shanghai model; recoil from those who differ; the stupefying effects of misused technology. These urgent problems also sharpen Jane Jacobs’ question to me, ‘So what would you do?’ In Part Three I am going to answer her – with a big caveat. Issues like recoil from

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felt as a tactile sensation. The sound of footsteps at night or honking horns during the day is an alert to the presence of others; Jane Jacobs’ famous dictum that, for safety’s sake, buildings should provide ‘eyes on the street’ should be expanded to ‘ears on the street’, particularly at night

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poor version of the London terrace squares in Bloomsbury. Like Cerdà, Aravena intends them to scale up, so that they become an additive grid. Unlike Jane Jacobs, he has no fear of scaling up, even though he has started small; the appalling conditions of the poor in his country demand a large

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people can easily get to places throughout the superblock. Meant to begin in Cerdà’s home neighbourhood of Eixample, this remaking is sometimes sold as Jane-Jacobs-comes-to-Barcelona – but misleadingly; there’s nothing bottom-up about this plan. In order for the superblocks to work, they have to be coordinated

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first to admit that the planning practices described in the following pages have a retrospective clarity they lacked when I first felt the sting of Jane Jacobs’ taunt, ‘So what would you do?’ It took time to find ways to engage the gap between the built and the lived, the ville and

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the cité. I. CO-PRODUCE –WORKING WITH OPEN FORMS Co-production, not consultation After Jane Jacobs, few planners would brazenly declare to the public, as Robert Moses did, ‘Submit; I know what’s best.’ In place of that brazen assertion, there

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, Cerdà’s blocks or Olmsted’s park. The first time is adaptive in character, accounting the context of what’s already been made. This is Jane Jacobs’ domain of ‘slow growth’. The second can seem a malign time, violating or erasing context, as did Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, and as do many

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of urban time is to relate it to the time of climate change. Can big ruptures be likened to a storm striking the city? In Jane Jacobs’ frame of reference they should be. As in the highway Robert Moses wanted to run through Washington Square in New York, they are ‘cataclysmic’ projects

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. But still, as I now realize, all of this theory came at an immense cost to her. That appears in the contrast between Arendt and Jane Jacobs, who lived in New York at the same time but so far as I know had no contact with one another. Jacobs, so committed in

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the aspects of living in a city. 14. Mumford worked on a piece of Garden City in this project in Sunnyside, Queens, New York. 15. Jane Jacobs’ remedy for dead urban space: Greenwich Village, New York, as a throwback to Paris before Haussmann. 16. Unlike Olmsted, Jacobs preferred social spaces tied to

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of one another. 40. In Mumbai, an internally open street mixes working and dwelling in the same space at the same time – street life as Jane Jacobs celebrated it in New York. 41. In Naples, the presence of outsiders, in the form of tourists, brings life to a previously dead street. Images

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. 18. Aristotle, Politics, Book, Chapters 11–12, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/6762/6762-h/6762-h.htm#link2HCH0090. 19. Richard Sennett, ‘An Urban Anarchist: Jane Jacobs’, The New York Review of Books, 1 January 1970. 20. Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 344–58. 21

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(Barcelona) see also grid, Cerdian Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote Charles, Prince of Wales Charter of Athens Chicago, Cabrini-Green commodities market and Great Depression Jane Jacobs and lakefront Musil and Tocqueville and and natural terrain Park-Burgess map Plan of Polish ghetto primary school project Robert Taylor Homes street furniture streetscape

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de la Paix Champs-Élysées and Charter of Athens Commune courtyards department stores Eiffel Tower Haussmann’s boulevards Herzen in Hotel de Ville Hôtel Salé Jane Jacobs and Louvre La Madeleine church Marais quarter modernity of Montmartre at night Palais-Royal Périphèrique Place Louis XV (Place de la Concorde) Plan Voisin Proust

Emergence

by Steven Johnson  · 329pp  · 88,954 words

detected did people begin to think about studying self-organizing systems on their own merits. Keller and Segel saw it in the slime mold assemblages; Jane Jacobs saw it in the formation of city neighborhoods; Marvin Minsky in the distributed networks of the human brain. What features do all these systems share

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a Potemkin village without a Potemkin. That mix of order and anarchy is what we now call emergent behavior. Urban critics since Lewis Mumford and Jane Jacobs have known that cities have lives of their own, with neighborhoods clustering into place without any Robert Moses figure dictating the plan from above. But

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, writers, Puerto Rican immigrants, and working-class Italian-Americans—responded with outrage, and at the center of the protests was an impassioned urban critic named Jane Jacobs. Jacobs had just spearheaded a successful campaign to block urban-development kingpin Robert Moses’s plan to build a superhighway through the heart of SoHo

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June of 1962, a full year after the appearance of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Lewis Mumford published a scathing critique of Jane Jacobs’s manifesto in his legendary New Yorker column, “The Sky Line.” In her prescriptions for a sidewalk-centric urban renewal, “Mother Jacobs”—as Mumford derisively

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a standard for pricing community participation that actually works. The connection between pricing and feedback is itself more than a metaphor. As a character in Jane Jacobs’s recent Socratic dialogue, The Nature of Economies, observes: “Adam Smith, back in 1775, identified prices of goods and rates of wages as feedback information

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created. An early draft of the game that Wright showed me included a brilliant neighborhood-creation system that seemed straight out of the pages of Jane Jacobs. City neighborhoods are defined from the bottom up, as players establish their own homesteads in various regions of the virtual space. Any player can create

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dynamism of the traditional organic city: the New Urbanist movement has begun to transform America’s suburban development practices, by following the rules outlined by Jane Jacobs almost a half century ago: shorter blocks, livelier sidewalks, mixed-used zoning, and pedestrian-based transportation. Despite the Bengali typhoon of the digital revolution—or

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now viewed as one of the classic examples of self-organizing behavior.” Ibid., 51. It also unearthed: In Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes the decentralizing mentality this way: “In principle, these are much the same tactics as those that have to be used to understand and to

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, orderly patterns emerge out of lower-level randomness; in chaotic systems, unpredictable behavior emerges out of lower-level deterministic rules.” Ibid., 14. But in the: Jane Jacobs describes these systems as “dynamically stable systems”: “Every kind of system that is neither inert nor disintegrated. This includes all living systems: ecosystems, organisms, cells

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of resources and diminishing returns. Negative feedback eventually checked the turbulent growth generated by positive feedback.” De Landa, 1997, 77. But the new: As usual, Jane Jacobs was quick to adapt these new ideas to her understanding of the city: “The analogy that comes to mind is faulty feedback. The conception of

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to come. Nearly four years ago, days after Alexa and I moved into our apartment in the West Village, I finally got around to reading Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of the Great American Cities. I knew Jacobs had lived in the Village while writing the book, but I didn’t

Saving America's Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age

by Lizabeth Cohen  · 30 Sep 2019

postwar American urbanism stems partly from its frequent framing as a monumental battle between the clashing visions of the villainous Robert Moses and the saintly Jane Jacobs. Moses is frequently depicted as epitomizing government arrogance and the prioritizing of planners’ projects over people. And Jacobs, in turn, is hailed for slamming planners

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, straighter, faster-moving main streets; abundant—preferably off-street—parking; and secondary streets dead-ended to discourage drivers from threading their way through residential neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs, critic though she was of urban renewal, praised New Haven’s traffic commissioner William McGrath in her Death and Life of Great American Cities in

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combined them seamlessly into a “brief” that he would dictate, leaving spaces for others to fill in details.63 It is worth noting that despite Jane Jacobs’s skepticism about top-down planning in her Death and Life of Great American Cities, she shared Logue’s embrace of an administrative structure for

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how democracy should work in cities. In time it gave ballast to participatory democratic critics of urban renewal in New Haven and elsewhere. It was Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, not a book of academic scholarship but nonetheless a learned one that would help transform expectations

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, the reality of urban responsibility and suburban retreat continued to frustrate Logue.111 It played no small part in fact in his deepening feud with Jane Jacobs. Logue published an appreciative but critical review of Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities in Architectural Forum in March 1962, predictably

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be spent on the cities they leave behind them at the close of each work day.”112 Although Logue concluded his review with “We need Jane Jacobs … to keep on giving us the needle,” there was little doubt that in Logue’s mind, Jacobs had let suburban residents of the metropolis off

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the chance to pioneer a new model for the nation of how to revitalize a major city. In Boston, Ed Logue was determined to show Jane Jacobs that urban renewal could be done right. 5.   Battling for a New Boston One of Logue’s greatest challenges when he arrived in Boston was

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Christopher Lydon, then a Globe reporter, remembers alerting Winship in 1966 to a critical report by Michael Appleby about Logue’s Boston activities, commissioned by Jane Jacobs, Herbert Gans, and other determined opponents of the effort by the newly elected mayor, John Lindsay, to recruit Logue to New York City. To Lydon

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try to hire Logue to implement the ambitious program, a proposal that met opposition from Logue skeptics in New York, such as the planning critic Jane Jacobs and the Columbia sociologist Herbert Gans, author of the 1962 book The Urban Villagers about Boston’s West End.40 But the real obstacle to

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his former work and from the typical modernist emphasis on isolated towers, superblocks, and car-dependent residences and commerce. He proclaimed wryly, “This is my Jane Jacobs period.”101 Roosevelt Island became Logue’s pride and joy, the ultimate fulfillment of his utopian vision for a socially diverse and architecturally distinctive New

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public spaces in future housing designs.123 Not surprisingly, the social engineering required to integrate UDC projects like New Towns by income and race offended Jane Jacobs and her followers, even when they sympathized with Logue’s goal. Jacobs explained her critique this way: “You take a clean slate and you make

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agree not to sell their subsidized homes for ten years or encounter substantial penalties.)44 In a statement that surely would have amused his nemesis Jane Jacobs for how it echoed her own preaching, Logue declared, “We need front stoops again.” In truth, however, Logue’s commitment to Jacobs’s “eyes on

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Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson, eds., Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).   16. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961); for a critique along these lines at her death, see Nicolai Ouroussoff, “Outgrowing

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Jane Jacobs,” NYT, April 30, 2006. For other recent considerations of Jacobs, see Peter L. Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); and Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of

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Jane Jacobs (New York: Knopf, 2016).   17. Martin Anderson, The Federal Bulldozer: A Critical Analysis of Urban Renewal, 1949–1962 (Cambridge, MA

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: MIT Press, 1964); Reason website, http://www.reason.com, particularly Jacobs’s obituary, “Jane Jacobs, RIP,” http://reason.com/blog/2006/04/25/jane-jacobs-rip, and “Jane Jacobs at 100,” http://reason.com/blog/2016/05/04/jane-jacobs-at-100, which labels her “the great defender of urban freedom.” Peter Laurence offers a careful

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’s thinking overlapped with that of prominent conservatives like Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper and where she recognized that government action was needed; Laurence, Becoming Jane Jacobs, 289–305.   18. Lawrence P. Goldman, “Eulogy, Edward J. Logue, Memorial Service, April 27, 2000,” Faneuil Hall, Boston, MDL, 4. For Logue’s opinion of

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-Jacobs debate at MoMA; Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 44, where Logue said, “The only thing I have any respect for Jane Jacobs for is that when her son became a CO in the Vietnam War, she said, ‘The hell with this, I’m going to go to

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Canada with him.’”   22. “Godmother of the American City,” interview by James Howard Kunstler expanded from Metropolis, March 2001, in Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016), 73–75, 95. Also, Yardley, “Master Builder’s Mixed Legacy,” NYT. Logue claimed that

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published 1930), 236.   21. Logue to Mary Nelles, November 4, 1944, EJL, Series 1, Box 5, Folder 77; Max Page and Timothy Mennel, eds., Reconsidering Jane Jacobs (Chicago: American Planning Association, 2011), 5–6. For Maurice Rotival’s bird’s-eye viewing, see Rachel D. Carley, “Tomorrow Is Here: New Haven and

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, Kenneth A. Simon, “Suburbia: The Good Life in Connecticut?,” http://www.simonpure.com/suburbia_print.html, 4.   88. Leeney, Elms, Arms, and Ivy, 58.   89. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 365–68.   90. Quote in “Richard C. Lee, 86, Mayor Who Revitalized New

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Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 158–64.   62. Harold Grabino, interview, March 22, 2006, by telephone, Ruben, transcript, 12.   63. Wexler, interview.   64. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961), 410–13.   65. Logue, interview, Steen, December 13, 1983, New York, NY, 6

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. 111. In a provocative essay, Thomas Campanella contends that planners today continue to see their profession as low status and of trivial significance. He holds Jane Jacobs responsible, arguing that her critique of planners “diminished the disciplinary identity of the planning profession” and “privilege[d] the grassroots over plannerly authority and expertise

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decline, his blaming of Jacobs suggests that he misses how planners also lost out to development administrators; Thomas J. Campanella, “Jane Jacobs and the Death and Life of American Planning,” in Reconsidering Jane Jacobs, ed. Max Page and Timothy Mennel (Chicago: Planners Press of the American Planning Association, 2011), 141–60. 112. Logue, “View

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from the Village,” on Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities, “American Cities: Dead or Alive?—Two Views,” AF 116, no. 3 (March 1962): 90. 113. Ieoh Ming

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: “Urban Planning and Urban Revolt? A Case Study,” PA 49, no. 1 (January 1968): 134–56; and Archer, “New Haven: Renewal and Riots,” 729–32. Jane Jacobs told the NYT, “Logue tosses people and small business around ruthlessly. If you want to know what he does, ask the rioters in New Haven

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the end of the parking garage”; interview in Gesing, Model City film.   84. 1963 Campaign “Downtown Campaign Q&A” (120 seconds), film footage, RCL.   85. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961).   86. Interview with Richard Lee quoted in Powledge, Model City, 250–55. The

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facilities; Logue, “What Sort of Future for Boston? A Look at Home from Abroad,” Boston University Journal 18, no. 1 (Winter 1970): 49–51. 112. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Vintage, 1961); Logue, “The View from the Village,” in “American Cities: Dead or Alive?—Two

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, April 11, 2015, Cambridge, MA. The Appleby report did, however, get covered in Robert F. Hannan, “Logue’s Moves Blunt Criticism,” BH, December 11, 1966. Jane Jacobs told the Village Voice that Logue “is just a slightly smoother Robert Moses” and that his coming to New York would be “New York’s

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-parks/; Yonah Freemark and Susanne Schindler, “Twin Parks,” in Affordable Housing in New York, 226–30. 124. Jane Jacobs, interview by James Howard Kunstler, “Godmother of the American City,” expanded from Metropolis, March 2001, in Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2016), 81. In early 1967 on a

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belief about their new towns, etc. I wish they would just leave me alone”; quoted in Robert Kanigel, Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016), 260. 125. Margaret Mead, epilogue to Campbell, New Towns: Another Way to Live, 267. 126. Freemark, “Entrepreneurial State,” 306

Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier

by Edward L. Glaeser  · 1 Jan 2011  · 598pp  · 140,612 words

building activity, which has made those cities harder to afford. Many of the ideas in this book draw on the wisdom of the great urbanist Jane Jacobs, who knew that you need to walk a city’s streets to see its soul. She understood that the people who make a city creative

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cities, like Detroit and Manchester, haven’t done well in the long run because their industrial monocultures discourage the growth of new ideas and companies. Jane Jacobs explained this phenomenon by pointing out that new ideas are formed by combining old ideas. Even in information technology, some of the most successful entrepreneurs

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safety of Mumbai’s slums is that, while these places maybe poor, they’re also well-functioning social spaces, like the Greenwich Village described by Jane Jacobs in her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities fifty years ago. In these areas, residents watch the streets and alleys. Misbehavior is

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then, during the 1950s and 1960s, both public and private projects increasingly ran into resistance from grassroots organizers, like Jane Jacobs, who were becoming adept at mounting opposition to large-scale development. Jane Jacobs hardly seemed cut out for big-city glory. She graduated from Scranton’s Central High School in 1934 and left

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mortis.” In 1961, the same year that the City Planning Commission’s new zoning plan came into effect, the commission got into a fight with Jane Jacobs over demolishing sixteen blocks of Greenwich Village for urban renewal. Jacobs got a court order to stop the project. She assembled a broad range of

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high-rises have enough foot traffic to keep streets safe. Neither Midtown Manhattan nor Hong Kong is short on pedestrians, and crime is relatively rare. Jane Jacobs’s opposition to urban renewal led her to a more sweeping dislike for tall buildings in general. In The Death and Life of Great American

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taverns and thinkers and low-rise townhouses. She liked old buildings and thought that new skyscrapers wouldn’t permit the mixed uses that she loved. Jane Jacobs liked protecting old buildings because of a confused piece of economic reasoning. She thought that preserving older, shorter structures would somehow keep prices affordable for

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does protect history, but we shouldn’t pretend that these benefits come without a price. The Perils of Preservation In 1961, the same year that Jane Jacobs published her great book, the Pennsylvania Railroad was preparing to raze its old New York station. That railroad had built the station on Thirty-third

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Penn Station was a stunning structure, complete with Doric columns and a waiting room based on the Baths of Caracalla. The building’s architect, like Jane Jacobs, saw height as inimical to urban life, so he insisted that the building be short. The decision to go low would prove to be the

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be smaller. If the restrictions become strong enough, then places can even lose population, despite rising demand, as wealthier, smaller families replace poorer, larger ones. Jane Jacobs’s insights into the pleasures and strengths of older, lower urban neighborhoods were certainly correct, but she had too little faith in the strengths of

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more extreme case, where exciting street life is perfectly compatible with soaring structures. Not everyone should live in a high-rise. Plenty of urbanites, like Jane Jacobs, prefer older, shorter neighborhoods. However, plenty of others enjoy living in urban aeries, and government shouldn’t stop skyscrapers from fulfilling their dreams either. Limiting

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for criminals and for the revolutionaries who toppled three monarchs in sixty years, starting in 1789. Early nineteenth-century Paris might well have appealed to Jane Jacobs, but it didn’t seem so ideal to Napoléon III, which is why he turned to Baron Haussmann. Karl Marx described the reign of Napoléon

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those faster modes of travel by providing bigger, straighter streets. When Haussmann cut his boulevards, he was accommodating those new technologies, foreshadowing the expressways that Jane Jacobs opposed in lower Manhattan. Like later builders, Haussmann had his critics, who sought to discredit his projects by accusing him of corruption and fictitious accounting

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, depicts an excessively monumental, anonymous city where disconnected men lived aimless lives surrounded by sterile grandeur. This picture would have been an apt illustration for Jane Jacobs’s description of the breakdown in street life that comes from standardization and overly long city blocks. Other critics disliked the monotonous gray of all

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that grew because a faster form of transportation enabled the rich to travel farther and buy bigger homes with more land. In the 1950s, when Jane Jacobs fought against running a road through Washington Square Park, she was fighting to save nineteenth-century sprawl from twentieth-century sprawl. The next step after

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million in 2007 dollars) for state highway projects, such as the parkways built on Long Island by Robert Moses, New York’s master builder (and Jane Jacobs’s bête noire), who was also one of the world’s great experts on and advocates of limited-access highways. During the Great Depression, the

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be. We burn forests and oil and inevitably hurt the landscape that surrounds us. If you love nature, stay away from it. In the 1970s, Jane Jacobs argued that we could minimize our damage to the environment by clustering together in high-rises and walking to work, and this point has been

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America. Granted, transportation spending in urban areas is difficult. Large urban projects are extremely expensive. As the famed battle over the Lower Manhattan Expressway between Jane Jacobs and master builder Robert Moses reminds us, building where people already live invariably involves far more community opposition than building in green fields. Moreover, far

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to mention all the distinguished urbanists who have moved my thinking, but it should be obvious that much of the book bears the imprint of Jane Jacobs, who bestrides the world of cities like a colossus. Following common practices, Wikipedia is not listed in the bibliography or citations, because any Wikipedia fact

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Patterns 2008, www.census.gov/econ/cbp. 33 single-industry cities ... new ideas and companies: Glaeser et al., “Growth in Cities,” 1132, 1150-51. 33 Jane Jacobs . . . old ideas: Jacobs, Economy of Cities, 47-53. 33 Michael Bloomberg . . . could help them: “Biography,” Office of the Mayor, New York City, 2010, www.nyc

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different types ... of commercial districts: Ibid. 144 picayune detail of the code: Ibid., 25. 145 “piece of built-in rigor mortis”: Alexiou, Jane Jacobs, 91. 145 a fight with Jane Jacobs: Asbury, “Board Ends Plan.” 146 Jacobs published her masterpiece: Jacobs, Death and Life, Random House, 1961. 146 between one and two hundred households

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the cleverest papers ... less new construction and higher price: Albert Saiz, “The Geographic Determinants of Housing Supply,” 1253-96. 148 The building’s architect, like Jane Jacobs, saw height: Moore, Life and Times of Charles Follen Mckim, 274; and Ballon and McGrath, New York’s Pennsylvania Stations, 54. 148 preparing to raze

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. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Albion, Robert Greenhalgh. The Rise of New York Port [1815-1860]. New York: Scribner’s, 1939. Alexiou, Alice Sparberg. Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Amaker, Norman C. “Milliken v. Bradley: The Meaning of the Constitution in School Desegregation Cases.” Hastings

City: Urbanism and Its End

by Douglas W. Rae  · 15 Jan 2003  · 537pp  · 200,923 words

resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. Jane Jacobs, 1961 CONTENTS Preface, ix 1 Creative Destruction and the Age of Urbanism, 1 PART ONE / URBANISM 2 Industrial Convergence on a New England Town, 35

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trust and cooperation among civilians, and thus to reduce the strain on public sector responsibility for the keeping of good order and civil respect. As Jane Jacobs wrote: The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police

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advantages of the help, the sympathy, and the fellowship of his neighbors.56 181 U R B A N I S M Several others, including Jane Jacobs, have since independently discovered this idea, and Robert Putnam has made it a part of speech in American English with his Bowling Alone.57 It

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down street-corner and mid-block sites throughout the workingclass neighborhoods and the downtown, was at once a normative force (“eyes on the street,” as Jane Jacobs would say) and a major layer of opportunity for each generation of workers and their families. The relatively thick layer of housing, thickest of all

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very fact of mixing would consign an area to one of the lower zoning categories and signal a diminution of quality. Often, as suggested by Jane Jacobs, among others, the loss of mixed uses would reduce security, confidence, and real human value in many neighborhoods.20 The evolution toward regional hierarchy would

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in their monthly dues. Even peace on city streets was partly lost in this era, although it will not be lost to the future. If Jane Jacobs is right, and I believe she is broadly correct, then the tiny texture of retailing, of mixed-use neighborhoods, and of civic engagement 391 E

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N I S M Figure 12.6. Adaptive reuse of home and store. Author photo. same streets. People can become “public characters” of the sort Jane Jacobs has been and has written about, helping to provide the modicum of social glue that makes so great a difference on city streets.55 Where

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: United Illuminating, 1990), 173. 45. Contact with strangers, handled with responses that allow civil cooperation well short of personal intimacy, is at the heart of Jane Jacobs’ justly celebrated work on urbanism. See Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961). See also Lyn H. Lofland

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Harvard-based civil engagement project, including people like Gerald Gamm, Peter Dobkin Hall, Robert Putman, and Theda Skocpol. Some other notables—Robert Fishman, Kenneth Jackson, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, David Nye, Richard Sennett, and John Stilgoe—were engaged in the project simply by my plucking their works from the shelf and poring

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he sold to me and that became the matrix for my spatial analysis of the city in that era. Taylor is, in the spirit of Jane Jacobs, a “public character” who does much to spread civility, and historical memory, through the streets of New Haven. Another public character who has been helpful

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