THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT

AMERICAN 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 a 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.[who?] 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.
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. Later Le Corbusier
devised the Radiant City, composed of skyscrapers within a park. Jacobs argues that all
these are irrelevant to how cities work, and therefore moves on to explain workings of
cities in the first part of the book.

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. To make this eye protection
effective at enhancing safety, there should be “an unconscious assumption of general
street support” when necessary, or an element of “trust”. As the main contact venue,
pavements contribute to building trust among neighbors over time. 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, thwart segregation and racial discrimination.

A final function of sidewalks is to provide a non-matriarchy environment for children to

play. This is not achieved in the presumably “safe” city parks - an assumption that Jacobs
seriously challenges due to the lack of surveillance mechanisms in parks. 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. Intricacy is the variety of reasons people use parks, among them centering or
the fact that parks have a place known as their centers. 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 coffers.

Part 2
Given the importance of all kinds of diversity, intricately mingled in mutual support, 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. Conversely,
homogeny or superficially diverse-looking homogeneous areas lack beauty. Moreover,
diversity is not the root cause of traffic congestions, which is caused by vehicles and not
people in themselves. Lively, diverse areas encourage walking. 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. In fact, to make these areas successful and thereby dispose of such ruinous uses,
diversity should be enhanced. 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. Jacobs
suggests that exerting controls on the scale of street frontage permitted to a use would
alleviate such a use.

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.

Self destruction of outstanding successful districts occurs by ousting less affluent

dwellers and businesses, to replace them with more affluent or profitable ones, probably
as the multiplication of those already existing in that district. This not only erodes the
variety of dwellers and businesses as the base for diversity in that specific district, but
also has a cross-effect on the diversity of other localities by depriving them from such
profitable businesses and affluent residents needed for mutual support. 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. For instance, the reason
that slums remain slums is the unstable population of residents there, ready to get out
when they have the choice. 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 monies 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, 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”. These cataclysmic monies, in the absence of gradual money, waste city
districts which are indeed fit for city life and possess a potential for rapid improvements.

Part 4
Part four of the book is dedicated to effective tactics 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.
The government guarantees a rent to the landlords. Tenants pay subsidized rents,
calculated based on their income level, and the government pays the difference. This
way, under circumstances that tenants’ incomes increase, they are not forced to leave, for
their rents would be adjusted. Therefore, diversity would be enhanced by keeping those
wishing to remain at their choice. Tenants might be encouraged to stay by letting them
own the house gradually, after years of paying rents. 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 intricacy
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.