A review by robertrivasplata
The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 50th Anniversary Edition by Jane Jacobs

funny hopeful informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.0

Finally read the now classic criticism of American/European urban planning written all the way back in 1961. So many of Jacobs's criticisms of urban planning were so prescient so long ago that they almost seem cliche today. Jacobs hated parking lots in cities before it was cool to hate parking lots in cities. The style is very conversational, so it's easy to imagine Jacobs talking my ear off on these topics on the sidewalk outside my house. I can totally imagine her talking with some of my “public character” neighbors. Jacobs's style is a great example of 1961 East Coast English. One of the striking things about Death & Life of American Cities is how many of the urban planning dysfunctions from 1961 are pretty much unchanged today, to the point that it's easy to forget how long ago Jacobs was writing this. At the time of writing, North America's scrapped streetcar systems were still a recent memory! & now were are in the position where Jacobs's ideas are accepted & current but we now have 62 years' worth of car-centric development piled on top of the old problems she was writing about. I like her recommendation that a sidewalk needs to be 30ft wide & have shade trees between the sidewalk & the street, & that the 30 ft figure comes from the amount of room needed to accommodate both a game of double dutch, & passerby. The discussion of different uses on a residential street, including mortuaries, is going to make me see Bob's Burgers (especially the setting of the titular burger joint & it's street) in a whole new light. Her discussion of districts & use of the term “districts” perversely makes me think of the latest installment in the Civilization computer game series, which has a conception of urban planning pretty much the opposite of Jacobs's, with different city functions explicitly separated. I wonder how much the level of community organizing has changed in major cities of the U.S. since Jacobs's time. The economic relationships between the ages of properties & affordability of rents were considerably changed by the early 2000s if not earlier. I wish the old-ass buildings in my neighborhood had cheaper rents!