Point Of 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	:	Special 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

The Death and Life of Great American Cities Hardcover | Pages: 472 pages

Interpretation During 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.

Identify Books In Pursuance Of 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)

Rating Of Books The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Ratings: 4.31 From 11801 Users | 996 Reviews

Crit Of Books The Death and Life of Great American Cities

This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers. I picked up this book immediately after finishing The Power Broker, and I highly recommend this sequence to anyone who has the time. The conflict between Robert Moses, czar-like planner of New York City for almost half a century, and Jane Jacobs, ordinary citizen and activist, has become the source of legend. There is a book about it, Wrestling with Moses, a well-made documentary, Citizen

You know that feeling you get when someone expresses a political belief that you share, but explains the position using arguments that you find unavailing, anecdotal, or specious? That's what this book felt like. It was like de Tocqueville takes on modern American cities: inductive reasoning applied selectively to undergird a set of beliefs and proselytize for their superiority.I had such high hopes for this one, but it dragged on relentlessly. I made it about halfway through this book before

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

Evidently an important work within the author's field, this book deals with the concept of community and the nature of people, and the elements of a city that make those things possible. Many examples from both Boston and Manhattan are listed, but the majority of the cited/reference material is very antiqued and has not been updated since the author prepared to write the book in the late 1950s, and it was originally published in 1961.Since I used to live very close to NYC, and now reside in

My mother is a historic preservationist in Greenwich Village, and I grew up a block away from Jacobs' favorite example of a well-functioning city block. How can I even review this book?I'm looking forward to reading some more recent of Jacobs' writings, because the context of this book is almost as important as the argument itself. To her credit, Jacobs fully acknowledges this. She's writing at a time when cities, including New York, are dying -- dangerous, shrinking, getting poorer. And forty

Jane Jacobs is brilliant. Her insights on urban planning are both practical and exciting.

Jane Jacobs' book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has been on my mental to-read list since I read The Power Broker, which was long ago. It was not the book I imagined it to be, Robert Moses here lurks mostly unmentioned darting behind some of the paragraphs, very rarely making an appearance in an actual sentence.Jacobs view of the city struck me as Darwinian - the more life there is, the more life there can be. The city is an ecosystem, and diversity promotes diversity. The problem