Jane Jacobs
Hardcover | Pages: 472 pages Rating: 4.31 | 11801 Users | 996 Reviews
Particularize Books During The Death and Life of Great American Cities
| Original Title: | The Death and Life of Great American Cities |
| ISBN: | 0375508732 (ISBN13: 9780375508738) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction (1962) |
Ilustration As Books The Death and Life of Great American Cities
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.Point Containing Books The Death and Life of Great American Cities
| Title | : | The Death and Life of Great American Cities |
| Author | : | Jane Jacobs |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | Deluxe Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 472 pages |
| Published | : | September 10th 2002 by Random House (first published 1961) |
| Categories | : | Nonfiction. Architecture. History. Cities. Urban Planning. Sociology. Urbanism. Geography |
Rating Containing Books The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Ratings: 4.31 From 11801 Users | 996 ReviewsCritique Containing Books The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Its a great book which taught me to see what works well and what doesnt in the city where I live (Tel Aviv). It showed me why so many of my favorite parts of the city work so perfectly. It also taught me to keep my phone in my bag and look around and analyze the city, as an entertaining and educational way to move around. I have to mention especially the light but articulate, humorous but precise language its written in. Its accessible and the theory put forward here is very clear. Although itFavorite passages:To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: The distrct must serve more than one purpose (preferably more than two), the blocks must be short, the buildings must vary in age and condition, and the population must be dense.Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, which used to be considered by many critics one of the most beautiful of American avenues (it was, in those days, essentially a suburban avenue of large, fine houses with
An urban classic that remains applicable.Jacobs makes a strong case and repeats it over and over.
Finally finished! I think Jacobs has retained a reputation for a certain cosy New-Urbanist kitchiness, and that's sadly unfair. The first few chapters, with their endless gushing lyricization of the "urban ballet" romantic descriptions of rows of stores on some Greenwhich village street did have my teeth mildly on edge. (They put me in mind of nothing so much as one of George RR Martin's descriptive passages of food or flags.) However, moving past that, her underlying view of the city is
One of the best books I've ever read, and one of the few that divide my life into two parts: before reading "Death and Life", & after. I can't walk through a city without seeing it through Jacobs' eyes.
I was prompted to read this book, which had sat on my shelf for a little while, by its inclusion in an essay reading list. As I needed to mark the essays, it was time to read the thing. I enjoyed the majority of it, although naturally some chapters have aged better than others. That in itself is interesting, though, and at times sad. Jacobs writes to challenge the utopian, modernist, grand-scale, top-down, social engineering approach to planning that prevailed (I over-generalise) between the
This took me a while to read because it was easy to put down. This book is famous for being one of the first sources of critique of American city planning, and many of her arguments seem to hold water even today. This said, I constantly asked myself "where is the science?" while reading this. I wonder if it had been published in this decade, would she be allowed to draw so many conclusions based almost entirely on personal observation and opinion. My assessment of this book mirrors my judgment
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