The Death and Life of Great American Cities:
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is arguably the most influential book written on urban planning in the 20th century. First published in 1961, the book is a scathing critique of modernist planning policies claimed by Jacobs to be destroying many existing inner-city communities.
Reserving her most vitriolic criticism for the "rationalist" planners (specifically Robert Moses) of the 1950s and 1960s, Jacobs argued that modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to find principles by which to plan cities. Among these policies the most violent was urban renewal; the most prevalent was and is the separation of uses (i.e. residential, industrial, commercial).
These policies, she claimed, destroy communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces. In their place Jacobs advocated a dense and mixed-use urban aesthetic that would preserve the uniqueness inherent in individual neighborhoods.[1] Her aesthetic can be considered opposite to that of the modernists, upholding redundancy and vibrancy, against order and efficiency. She frequently cites New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community. The Village, like many similar communities, may well have been preserved, at least in part, by her writing and activism.
The book also played a major role in the urban development of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where Jacobs was involved in the campaign to stop the Spadina Expressway.[2] Toronto, where Jacobs lived from 1968 until her death, is to this day regarded as one of the few major metropolises in North America to have successfully maintained a large number of residential neighborhoods in its downtown core. This status is attributed in part to Jacobs' writing and her local community activism.
The book continues to be Jacobs' most influential, and is still widely read by both planning professionals and the general public. Urban theorist Lewis Mumford, while finding fault with her methodology, encouraged Jacobs' early writings[3] in the New York Review of Books. Robert Caro has cited Jacobs' book as the strongest influence on The Power Broker, his biography of Robert Moses.
Jacobs' writings were an important influence on New Urbanism, an architecture and planning movement which emerged in the 1980s.
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