This is the best book I have read.New tools for looking at the world. At the end of this book Jacobs refers to a seminal work in the evolving science of organized complexity. Yet her method of studying cities- what makes them work successfully and what causes them to fail - reminds me more of some of the 16th/17th century physical scientists such as Galileo. Like them, she looked at her world free of the misconceptions and implicit assumptions of the "authorities", the city planners who used deduction from false premises rather than induction from detailed observation. Jacobs is a fantastic observer. Like the early scientists she is then able to generalize, always mindful of the limitations of her generalizations, and like the earlier scientists (cf. Galileo and ship building) she is interested in practical technology (in her case practical policy). While copyrighted in 1961, this book is all too relevant today: while some of its ideas are mainstream, we are still making many of the same errors. She draws her observations from New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco and for the reader familiar with those cities, especially the first three, there is an added dimension. I give this book 5 stars, because it provided me with new intellectual tools for analyzing the world, and it is fun applying them. At the same time, I will say that it is longer than it needs to be. Internalizing a concept, even one that may sound like common sense once it is enunciated, benefits from a certain amount of repetition and many examples, but there is too much repetition here.
What's most amazing about this book is that Jacobs wrote this in the beginning of the 1960's, at a time when government redevelopment projects were leveling the inner-cities. At the time, Jacobs must have sounded like a crackpot because her ideas where so diametrically opposed to the accepted standards of the time. However, time has shown that she was indeed correct on so many of her points. This book is essential reading for city planners and social scientists. But it would be of interest to all.