Book Review: Death and Life of Great American Cities
BOOK REVIEW
Death and Life of Great American Cities
by Jane Jacobs
Originally published in 1961, this groundbreaking work by urban visionary Jane Jacobs proposes some provocative ideas and concepts for creating space and social environment for living civilly in close quarters.Unfortunately, in North America, we have already lost many of the active street features that were common in 1961, and which gave a vibrancy to New York (and other cities) at that time. I was surprised at her position on city parks. Let me know what you think!
Here are my notes from this book:
Generally
Jane Jacobs considers that planners are following the dictates of an unhealthy planning model set up in the late 19th century (remember this was written in 1961!!) that proposed a garden city “away from the filthy city. She had no tolerance for planners and says that many of their plans contribute to “The Great Plight of Dullness” (housing projects and suburbs)
Projects rip out the heart of a neighbourhood by taking away activity on the street and replacing it with alienating housing optionw where people keep to themselves, don’t have their eyes on the street, don’t have public places to hang out. They also usually have elevators which she calls vertical streets that have none of the benefits of a public ones.
She calls for active diverse city streets that are active at different times of the day and with mixed uses to keep it lively, interesting, and to keep people involved in their street.
The uses of sidewalks – safety
P. 40
Peace is maintained on city sidewalks primarily by the police, but also by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards enforced by the people in the neighbourhood. In places where this is left to police it is a ‘jungle’. No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.
P. 44
A well-used street is apt to be a safe street.
Public and private space can’t ooze into each other
There must be eyes on the street belonging to the natural proprietors of the street
Buildings should be oriented to the street
The uses of sidewalks – contact
p. 81
When you have a lively street, you develop relationships with others on the street that can be casual (free from unwelcome entanglements, boredom, fears of giving offense, embarrassments, or commitments and all such paraphernalia of obligations that can accompany more limited relationships (like in the suburbs) . It is possible to be on excellent sidewalk terms with people who are very different from yourself. Such relationships can and do endure for many decades. As opposed to the pressure of “all or none” in a suburban setting where the apprehension about getting entangled with a family makes people keep to themselves. To increase the likelihood that you will get neighbours that are like you, suburbs also become homogenized which cuts into her criteria of having a diverse street community to keep it vibrant.
p. 85
When people have a choice of all or none, they usually choose none – in terms of associating with neighbours.
Consequently, public jobs that need doing, like watching children who are playing on the street, go undone
p. 89
The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on self-appointed public figures (shopkeepers); someone in frequent contact with a wide circle of people who use the street
p. 91
Word-of-mouth information doesn’t get passed on if public figures and active sidewalk life is lacking
p. 95
“lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow”
LA considered ‘culturally behind” because of no street life
The uses of sidewalks – assimilating children
p. 101
On an active street, there are many pairs of adult eyes on children “to think this represents an improvement in city child rearing is pure daydreaming”.
City kids know that if you want to do something you’re not supposed to, you go to the park and do it where noone will see
Casual adult surveillance, when adults intervene in children’s play when necessary is an essential feature to create a sense of community and responsibility for the peace of the neighbourhood. It also gives children a valuable lesson in civics because they see that strangers will act for the common good even if they don’t know each other.
p. 107
“planners do not seem to realize how high a ratio of adults is needed to rear children at incidental play” “only people rear children and assimilate them into civilized society”
p. 108
“in real life, and only from ordinary adults do children learn the first fundamental of successful city life: people must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson nobody learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of public resonsiblity for you”
Uses of neighbourhood parks
p. 117
Jacobs questions the urge to create open space asking for what? Muggings? Bleak vacuums between buildings?
p. 128
city parks are creatures of their surroundings
any single, overwhelmingly dominant use iof space imposes a limit on the use and usefulness (and safety) of a park
p. 132
no point bringing parks to where people are if in the process the reasons that people are there are wiped out and the park substituted for them. Parks cannot replace plentiful city diversity
p. 133
well loved parks benefit from a certain rarity value
p. 135
four elements of parks from which to assess their usefulness
1) Intricacy – the reasons people come to the park; diversity of people, activities, change in contour, groupings of trees, openings, various focal points; with centring being most important. A centre or main crossroads and pausing point, a climax; for those parks so small that they are all centre, their intricacy comes form minor differences at the peripheries. Centres should become stage settings for people
2) Centring (see #1 above)
3) Sun
4) Enclosure – presence of bulidngs around a park is important to enclose it, give it a definite shape so it doesn’t look like an unaccounted for leftover
p. 142
magnificent views and handsome landscaping fail to operate as demand goods – swimming, fishing, etc is a demand good.
p. 145
parks add attraction to n’hoods that ppl already find attractive for a variety of other rasons. They further depress n’hoods that people find unattractive for a wide variety of other uses, they exaggerate dullness, danger, emptiness. “the more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully casually and economically its people enliven and support well located parks
Uses of city neighbourhoods
p. 147
no direct simple relationship between good housing and good behaviour
Generators of diversity
p. 197
To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets, 4 conditions are indispensable (the absence of any one frustrates a district’s potential)
- Street or district must serve more than one primary function preferably two. These must insure the presence of ppl who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes but who are able to use many facilities in common
- Blocks must be short with frequent corners
- Variable ages and conditions of building stock so they vary in the economic yiels they must produce (new and risky ideas and enterprises need cheap rent)
- Sufficiently dnese concentration of ppl for whatever purpose thy may be
p. 249
Large swatches of construction built at one time are inherently inefficient for sheltering wide ranges of cultural, population, and business diversity.
p. 258
when an area is new it offers no economomic opossibilities to city diversity. Practical penalties of dullness stamp the n’hood early
p. 300
whenever ppl distributed thinly and an attractive opens up nearby it causes traffic congestion
Curse of border vacuums
p. 337
areas outside civic centres, large parks, big monuments are extraordinarily blight-prone or stagnant – a condition that precedes decay.
Slumming and unslumming
Gradual accommodation of immigrants into an’hood means we are capable of accepting and hangling strangers in a civilized fashion.
Edgymama 
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