A review by jentang
The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs

2.75

i shoved this book down my throat in two days flat so i could churn out a 2000 word book review. (highly don't recommend doing so! oops!) as i actually start my review i'll be revisiting this a lot more, and might even include an excerpt of some of my thoughts once they've been transcribed digitally. for now, though: i'm a complete novice to city planning. my suburban ass has not thought about how baltimore has been developed and maintained throughout the years!!!! nonetheless, i felt that jacobs' work was a good, digestible introduction to the field. especially in the beginning, her psychological-related concepts registered quite easily in my mind. there is no doubt that she's a pioneer in her field, and i'm as close to excited as i can be to read the ideas of her opponent, robert moses, sometime in the future. i do wish that she had been less repetitive, wordy, and thoroughly contradictory in her own writing. it's hard to understand the ideal course for city planning when one page says that old buildings are necessary in cities, the next says that they're useless in others, and yet another says that they don't matter whatsoever. jacobs has sufficiently cemented in my mind the true complexities of city planning, both through what she wrote and the way in which she wrote it. (it's true that i said just a few sentences ago that her writing was digestible; i suppose this is the effect of inhaling 472 pages of her style)