In the reviews on this site, I try to avoid directly recommending that readers go out and buy specific books. In this case though I’m going to break that rule. I think you should read The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
This is especially true if you have ever lived in a genuinely large city and become fascinated with how it works – how its different areas and districts connect with one another, how people and goods move about the city, how the city grows or decays over time. The conceptual model presented here will add a new clarity to your understanding of cities and, potentially, a new way of looking at them.
Jane Jacobs approaches the concerns and strengths of cities not as architectural or political issues but as problems of complexity. Indeed, the final chapter of this book explicitly connects its conclusions and observations to the then nascent scientific field of systems theory. This perspective is what makes The Death and Life of Great American Cities so groundbreaking.
Up until its publication in the 1950s, cities were perceived as fundamentally problematic environments for which the only remedy was destruction. Planners, inspired by Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard, saw their mission as being to liberate people from the tumult of the city by displacing them to quasi-suburban structures – hence the rise of the Garden City movement, which Jacobs identifies throughout the book as her antithesis. Planners were trying to solve complex urban problems with simple, regressive and anti-city solutions – but the housing projects they created ended up creating new and even more intransigent problems.
Jacobs, by starting out with the model of a city as a complex system that changes in time, proposes an entirely different set of solutions which take into account the nature of the city and the fundamental interconnectedness of its elements. Ensuring that a district is used for a variety of purposes, by a variety of groups, with numerous peaks of activity throughout the day. Treating with care the “borders” where train tracks or huge parks split the city, potentially deadening the adjoining streets. Preventing districts from self-destructing as floods of prosperous newcomers, drawn by the area’s success, threaten the very vitality and diversity that attracted them in the first place.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs paints a picture of the modern large city which I found enthralling, lifelike, vivid and inspiring. The city’s contradictory relationship with the automobile is treated with the seriousness and detail it deserves: Jacobs is as disparaging towards the outright enemies of the automobile as she is towards its more fervent evangelists.
Refreshingly, Jacobs is unafraid to attack the sort of sentimentalism that many of her natural sympathisers would tend to be drawn to. She defends the city as a system of nature (rather than its enemy) and rejects the view that parkland, trees and simulated suburbia will automatically solve the problems of a city. In this sense she shows herself unafraid to take issue with many of her likely sympathisers, and defines a genuinely urbanist position – not opposed to development per se, specifically opposed to dangerous development.
Can we learn from this book today, nearly 50 years after its initial publication? I think we can. I think that Jacobs’ way of thinking about cities, despite having had a strong influence on modern urban planning, is articulated in such a clear, compelling and lyrical way that it deserves to be read. It exercises the mind and allows you to ‘read’ the streets around you differently. But its value extends beyond its obvious topic, and anyone interested in complex human systems and how they work should read this book.
