THE DEATH AND LIFE OF

GREAT AMERICAN CITIES

 THE DEATH AND LIFE
OF GREAT
AMERICAN CITIES
Author : Jane Jacobs
Language : English
Publisher : Random House ,New York
Publication date : 1961
OCLC Number : 500754
Followed by : The Economy of Cities
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane
Jacobs, is a greatly influential book on the subject of
urban planning in the 20th century .
• First published in 1961, the book is an evaluation of
modernist planning policies claimed by Jacobs to be
destroying many existing inner-city communities.
• The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to
find principles by which to plan cities.
• Among these policies the most violent was urban
renewal; it was most prevalent 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 for "four generators of
diversity", in combination, these conditions create
effective economic pools of use.“
• 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 Spading
Expressway.
• The book continues to be Jacobs' most influential, and
is still widely read by both planning professionals and the
general public.
• Jacobs' writings were an important influence on New
Urbanism, an architecture and planning movement which
emerged in the 1980s.
• Jacobs' book is an attack on “orthodox” modern city
planning and city architectural design.
• Looking into how cities actually work, rather than how
they should work according to urban designers and
planners, Jacobs effectively describes the real factors
affecting cities, and recommends strategies to enhance
actual city performance.
 Part 1
• Jacobs briefly explains influential ideas in orthodox
planning, starting from Howard’s Garden city, indeed a set
of self-sufficient small towns, ideal for all but those with a
plan for their own lives.
• Concurrently, City Beautiful was developed to sort out
the monuments from the rest of the city, and assemble
them in a unit.
• She explores the three primary uses of sidewalks: safety,
contact and assimilating children.
• Street safety is promoted by pavements clearly marking
a public/private separation, and by spontaneous protection
with the eyes of both pedestrians and those watching the
continual flow of pedestrians from buildings.
• Moreover, self-appointed public characters such as
storekeepers enhance the social structure of sidewalk life
by learning the news at retail and spreading it.
• Jacobs argues that such trust cannot be built in
artificial public places such as a game room in a housing
project.
• Sidewalk contact and safety, together, prevent
segregation and racial discrimination.
• A final function of sidewalks is to provide a non-
matriarchy environment for children to play.
• Successful, functional parks are those under intense
use by a diverse set of companies and residents.
• Such parks usually possess four common
characteristics: intricacy, centering, sun, and enclosure.
•Sun, shaded in the summer, should be present in
parks, as well as building to enclose parks.
•Jacobs then explores a city neighborhood, tricky
to define for while it is an organ of self-
governance, it is not self-contained.
• Three levels of city neighborhoods; city, districts,
and streets, can be identified.
• Streets should be able to effectively ask for help
when enormous problems arise.
• Effective districts should therefore exist to
represent streets to the city
.

• City is the source of most public money – from

federal or state funds.
 Part 2
• Part two of the book explains the conditions for city
diversity or the economic workings that produce lively
cities.
• First, districts must serve more than one primary
function to ensure presence of people using the same
common facilities at different times.
• Second, blocks should be short, to increase path options
between points of departure and destinations, and
therefore enhance social and as a result economic
development.
• Third, buildings should be at varying ages,
accommodating different people and businesses which can
afford different levels of rents.
• Fourth, there should be a dense concentration of people,
including residents, to promote visible city life.
• It is important that all of these four conditions are
necessary to generate diversity, and absence of each one
would result in homogeny and ultimately dullness.
•Jacobs refutes the myths about disadvantages of
diversity presented in orthodox planning.
• First she argues that diversity does not innately
diminish visual order.
•Moreover, diversity is not the root cause of traffic
congestions, which is caused by vehicles and not people
in themselves.
• Diversity is not permissive to ruinous uses- if
defined correctly- either.
• A category of uses contributing nothing to a district’s
general convenience, such as junk yards, grow in
unsuccessful spots.
• A second category of conceived ruinous uses such as
bars and theaters are a threat in grey areas, but not
harmful in diverse city districts.
• The final category includes parking lots, large or
heavy truck depots, gas stations, gigantic outdoor
advertising and enterprises harmful due to their wrong
scale in certain streets
.
Part 3

• Part three of the book is designated to analyzing four

forces of decline and regeneration in city cycles:
successful diversity as a self-destructive factor,
deadening influence of massive single elements in
cities, population instability as an obstacle to diversity
growth, and effects of public and private money.
• Massive single facilities such as railroad tracks,
enormous parks, and college campuses create vacuums
in areas immediately next to their borders because such
areas (adjoining borders) are a terminus of generalized
use.
• Jacobs suggests to figure out border-line cases, such
as special park uses (chess or checker pavilions), in
order to blend the border and the immediate
neighboring area together and yet keep the city as city
and the massive element (such as the park) as itself.
• Population instability is the third factor in the life
cycle of cities.
• Therefore, Jacobs suggests that the real slumming
process, as opposed to slum shifting through renewal
projects or slum immuring practices of orthodox
planning, is to make slum dwellers desire to stay and
develop neighborhoods.
• This could possibly be done by gradual incremental
toll which make continual improvements in the quality
of lives of individual residents of slums.
• The last factor is public and private money.
• Jacobs argues that money has its limitations,
incapable of buying inherent success for cities lacking
the success factors.
• She classifies money into 3 forms: credit extended by
traditional, non-governmental lending institutions ie,
money provided by government through tax receipts or
borrowing power, and money from the underworld of
cash and credit.
• Jacobs argues that despite the differences, these
three kinds of money behave similarly in one
regard: They shape cataclysmic, rather than gradual,
changes in cities.
• She matches the cycles in city districts with these
types of money:
• “First the withdrawal of all conventional
money, then ruination financed by shadow-world
money; then selection of the area by the Planning
Commission as a candidate for cataclysmic use of
government money to finance renewal clearance”.
 Part 4

• Part four of the book is dedicated to effective policy

to actually improve city performance.
• These include: subsidized dwellings, attrition of
automobiles as opposed to erosion of cities by cars,
improvement of visual order without sacrificing
diversity, salvaging projects, and redesigning governing
and planning districts.
• Jacobs suggests subsidized dwellings be offered to
those who cannot afford normal housing.
• Unlike the current practice in which the government
acts as the landlord, these people can and should be
housed by private enterprises in regular buildings, not
projects
.
• Jacobs admits that there are potentials for
corruption, but argues that corruption grows as the
target of corruption remains unchanged.
• Thus, she suggests that methods of subsidized
dwelling be revised and varied every eight or ten
years.
• Cities offer multiple choices. However, one cannot
take advantage of this fact without being able to get
around easily.
• Thus, accommodating city transportation is
important, and this should not destroy the related
intricate and concentrated land use.
• She proposes tactics of giving room to other desired
city uses which compete with automobile traffic needs
such as widening sidewalks for street displays which
would narrow the vehicular roadbed and thereby
automatically reduce car use, and traffic congestion.
• Jacobs argues that visual cohesiveness should not be
regarded as a goal.
• She stresses the importance of the visual
announcement that a high number of streets would
make by picturing an intense life.
• On the down side, if such streets go on and on to the
distance, the difficulty and intensity of the
“foreground” appears to be repeated infinitely.
• Therefore the endless repetition and continuation
should be hampered, by introducing visual
irregularities and interruptions into the city scene, such
as irregular street patterns with bends, special
buildings, etc.
• Finally Jacobs argues that cities are a problem of
organized complexity.
• Unlike simple two-variable or disorganized-
complexity problems of statistical randomness,
problems of organized complexities are composed of
numerous interrelated factors.
• Therefore, horizontal structures in city planning
would work better than vertical structures, which aim
at oversimplifying problems of such complexity .
 DANCING HOUSE (1995)
KANSAS CITY BUBLIC LIBRARY
FRANK GEHRY