Front cover image for The death and life of great American cities

The death and life of great American cities

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning ... [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition
eBook, English, 2016
Vintage Books, New York, 2016
1 online resource
9780525432852, 052543285X
966241736
The peculiar nature of cities. The uses of sidewalks : safety
The uses of sidewalks : contact
The uses of sidewalks : assimilating children
The uses of neighborhood parks
The uses of city neighborhoods
The conditions for city diversity. The generators of diversity
The need for primary mixed uses
The need for small blocks
The need for aged buildings
The need for concentration
Some myths about diversity. Forces of decline and regeneration. The self-destruction of diversity
The curse of border vacuums
Unslumming and slumming
Gradual money and cataclysmic money
Different tactics. Subsidizing dwellings
Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles
Visual order : its limitations and possibilities
Salvaging projects
Governing and planning districts
The kind of problem a city is
Title from resource description page (Recorded Books, viewed December 05, 2016)