The death and life of great American cities
by Jane Jacobs · 1 Nov 1961
any one place is always replete with new improvisations. The stretch of Hudson Street where I live is each day the scene of an intricate sidewalk ballet. I make my own first entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, surely a prosaic occupation, but I
Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places
by Sharon Zukin · 1 Dec 2009 · 415pp · 119,277 words
first section of Jacobs’s best-selling 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities—an hour-by-hour description of the “intricate sidewalk ballet” on Hudson Street, outside her window—dramatizes the neighborly interdependence of local shopkeepers, housewives, schoolchildren, and customers at the corner bar, all patron saints of
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. It’s a normal evening at Union Square, but in this normality you find all the fascination of city life. Unlike in Jane Jacobs’s sidewalk ballet, the participants don’t know each other by name or face, and there is only limited interaction between them. In contrast, though, to Georg Simmel
The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving
by Leigh Gallagher · 26 Jun 2013 · 296pp · 76,284 words
’s signature drink, at his new neighborhood’s Cheers equivalent, the Downtown Cocktail Room. Hsieh has a vision to create his own version of the sidewalk “ballet” Jane Jacobs described, a place where people can live, work, and play without leaving their neighborhood. (It’s actually Jane Jacobs meets Ed Glaeser; the
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definitive critique of twentieth-century urban planning. It’s hard to overstate Jacobs’s role in urban planning, and her own artful explanation of the “sidewalk ballet” is worth citing in full here. She wrote that under the seeming disorder of cities, there was a “marvelous order for maintaining the safety of
Vanishing New York
by Jeremiah Moss · 19 May 2017 · 479pp · 140,421 words
one another, together and separate, but conscious. I love walking on East 116th just to feel again the “air like of loving,” that twentieth-century sidewalk ballet, the sense of being a human among other humans, connected if only by a moment of mutual acknowledgment on the city street. I walk farther
Where We Want to Live
by Ryan Gravel · 2 Feb 2016 · 259pp · 76,797 words
superblocks pervaded our formative years. Most of us never went shopping in a vibrant downtown district, rode transit on a regular basis, or enjoyed the “sidewalk ballet” that Jacobs so eloquently described in 1961.5 Sure, she and thousands of lesser-known heroes understood what was at stake and fought valiantly to
Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World
by Henry Grabar · 8 May 2023 · 413pp · 115,274 words
by a physical barrier or law enforcement agent,” she wrote. Sadik-Khan had grown up in Greenwich Village, the primal site of Jane Jacobs’s “sidewalk ballet.” More of a contact sport like rugby, she thought. When Sadik-Khan started working for the city in the late 1980s, she asked her mother
Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car
by Anthony M. Townsend · 15 Jun 2020 · 362pp · 97,288 words
mind. That’s the thinking behind an effort at MIT’s Aerospace Controls Lab, which is using deep learning to help computers understand the “intricate sidewalk ballet” described by urbanist Jane Jacobs in her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Researchers have already successfully programmed a conveyor with
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on City Sidewalks,” Curbed SF, March 14, 2018, https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/14/17120628/san-francisco-robot-ban-fees-yee-tech. 57“intricate sidewalk ballet”: Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961), 92. 57a conveyor with enough sense to learn our unwritten
The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City
by Alan Ehrenhalt · 23 Apr 2012 · 281pp · 86,657 words
of ale, and look for reminders of the street life that Jacobs cherished. There is plenty of activity on the street, if not the intricate “sidewalk ballet” that Jacobs talked about. It includes children, but not children romping delightfully in the street; most of them are in strollers or walking back home
The Metropolitan Revolution: The Rise of Post-Urban America
by Jon C. Teaford · 1 Jan 2006 · 395pp · 115,753 words
age when the suburban migration to detached, single-family homes and sprawling chain stores was proceeding with full force. Jacobs was attracted to the “intricate sidewalk ballet” of her own West Village street at a time when most Americans were attracted by the promise of ample parking.105 Jacobs’s rhetoric had
Aerotropolis
by John D. Kasarda and Greg Lindsay · 2 Jan 2009 · 603pp · 182,781 words
clean they’d obviously never seen a pigeon—but otherwise packed shoulder to shoulder like the loveliest stretches of my borough, where Jane Jacobs’s “sidewalk ballet” of people endlessly dances arabesques below our windows. Stapleton’s residents were learning the steps—dog walkers strolled the grassy median, and a few runners
The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley · 10 Jun 2013
The Warhol Economy
by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett · 15 Jan 2020 · 320pp · 90,115 words