It'll make a city slicker out of the most ardent farm boy

books:


	• The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs Vintage, 1992 - 458 pages average customer review:based on 63 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Read it

This is a book that relates to designers, and city planners as well as the "un-educated". Reading this book will certainly inform one on the purpose and importance of city planning.

Read it!

Still relevant, still useful....and still ignored by the common city engineer. Our city's planners need to re-read this sucker.

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It'll make a city slicker out of the most ardent farm boy

This book will give you a reason to want to go visit the city, or to go out and get into the city you already live in. Her reference to the "ballet of the sidewalks" gives a whole new twist to what is going on in a busy downtown. City planners, take note!

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The triumph of common sense

In an age when architects and planners were spouting all kinds of brave-new-world nonsense (or mindlessly absorbing it, or even worse - building it), Jacobs burst onto the scene with an incredible dose of sanity mixed with common sense and wisdom, carefully observing the urban environment and drawing a host of remarkably sensible conclusions. For some reason we architects seem always at risk of believing our own nuttiest fantasies. Jacobs is a perennial corrective.

A classic

If you are interested in community building, urban planning, and city life in general, this is a must-read. Though the book is older, the themes and ideas stand the test of time.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

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.

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