The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Author: Jane Jacobs Year: 1961 Source type: book Raw file: raw/books/jacobs-1961-death-and-life-of-great-american-cities.md

Summary

Jacobs's 1961 attack on orthodox city planning is an attempt "to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught." Working from street-level observation rather than statistical surveys, she argues that cities work — safely, economically, civically — through an "intricate and close-grained diversity of uses that give each other constant mutual support," generated by four conditions: mixed primary uses, small blocks, aged buildings, and dense concentration. Against this she sets the machinery of postwar planning (Garden City, Radiant City, City Beautiful, urban renewal, credit blacklisting, the automobile-oriented rebuild), which she diagnoses as a pseudoscience that mistakes the kind of problem a city is. The book closes by relocating cities in the scientific taxonomy as problems of organized complexity and by asserting the city as nature: "lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration."

Key Claims

Orthodox planning's genealogy: the Garden City (Howard) — "a terrible fiction" of self-contained, paternalistically controlled towns of 30,000 — flowed through the Decentrists (Mumford, Stein, Wright, Bauer), who taught that "the street is bad as an environment for humans," that super-blocks are the basic unit of design, and that commerce must be segregated; the Radiant City (Le Corbusier) made the same anti-city dream vertical; the City Beautiful (Burnham's 1893 Exposition) added the decontaminated civic center. All merged into "a sort of Radiant Garden City Beautiful" that is "irrelevant to the workings of cities."
The economics of city rebuilding are "a hoax": renewal rests on "vast, involuntary subsidies wrung out of helpless site victims" — ruined businesses, uncompensated leases, severed communities — not on reasoned public investment (p. 5; Panuch report quoted pp. 311–312).
Planning is a pseudoscience analogous to nineteenth-century bloodletting: "years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense" (p. 13). Bankers, planners and officials share "the same stage of elaborately learned superstition."
Sidewalk safety is produced not by police but by "an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves" (p. 32); the street needs (1) clear demarcation between public and private space, (2) "eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street," and (3) continuous users (p. 35).
The "public peace" of sidewalks is kept by strangers and casual users, not only residents: "The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts" (p. 56); these contacts are "the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow" (p. 73).
Street safety cannot be achieved by thinning people out: Los Angeles, "almost all suburban," has crime rates "so pre-eminent… it is in a category by itself" among large SMSAs (p. 32).
Projects produce "Turf": the rebuilt city "has junked a basic function of the city street and with it, necessarily, the freedom of the city" (p. 50); literal fences, guards and barbed wire around middle-income projects replicate the gang-territory system (pp. 47–49).
Sidewalk contact is a fine-grained balance of public and private — the "almost unconsciously enforced, well-balanced line showing, the line between the city public world and the world of privacy" (p. 62), embodied in keys left with Joe the delicatessen keeper and in Bernie the candy-store keeper's refusal ever to introduce customers to each other.
Planned areas that lack sidewalk life force a catastrophic choice between "togetherness" or nothing: forced intimacy produces choosy, exclusionary enclaves (Chatham Village); its absence produces total mutual avoidance — the elevator case of the boy left screaming for two hours while ninety acquaintances looked away (p. 66).
"Public characters" — storekeepers, barkeepers, settlement-house workers, plus specialized sidewalk characters — are the ganglia of the street's news network; formal organization grows only on top of this informal public life (pp. 68–71).
Children are assimilated to city life not in playgrounds but on lively sidewalks: "only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn — if they learn it at all — 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" (p. 82). Most parks and playgrounds put children under a lower ratio of adult eyes; "street gangs do their 'street fighting' predominately in parks and playgrounds" (p. 75). Residence-only planning designs "strictly for matriarchal societies" (p. 83).
Neighborhood parks are volatile and "volatile elements" that are "not automatically anything": their life is conferred by diverse surroundings — Rittenhouse Square's succession of users through the day versus Philadelphia's Washington Square, depopulated by a single-dominant-use office rim (pp. 96–98). Parks need intricacy, centering, sun and enclosure (pp. 103–106); problem parks must convert to specialized "demand goods" (pools, music, sports), since "magnificent views and handsome landscaping fail to operate as demand goods" (p. 108).
The "ideal" 7,000-person neighborhood unit is useless for self-government; only three neighborhoods work: the city as a whole, street neighborhoods, and districts of 30,000–200,000 "big enough to fight city hall" (pp. 117–133). Effective districts need "hop-skip" cross-links and time: "Time, in cities, is the substitute for self-containment" (p. 134).
Neighborhood networks "are a city's irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated" (p. 138).
Cities are "natural generators of diversity and prolific incubators of new enterprises" (p. 144); the four conditions for generating diversity are (1) mixed primary uses, (2) most blocks short, (3) a mingling of building ages including old ones, (4) sufficiently dense concentration of people (pp. 150–151). "The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make" (p. 150).
Old buildings are economically indispensable: "New ideas must use old buildings" (p. 188); time makes "the high building costs of one generation the bargains of a following generation" (p. 189); "the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time" (p. 198). Districts built all at once are "dead from birth" and age without diversifying (p. 198).
High dwelling density is wrongly blamed for slums: the data show successful districts (North End, Greenwich Village, Rittenhouse Square, Brooklyn Heights) at the highest densities, failing gray areas at half or less; overcrowding of rooms and density of dwellings are different facts (pp. 202–206). Densities are "a matter of performance"; "in-between" densities (roughly 20–100 dwellings/net acre) are "fit, generally, for nothing but trouble" (p. 209), and standardization sets in above roughly 200 dwellings per acre (p. 217).
Concentration of people in cities is "a positive good"; the negative view ("human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers") has "helped deaden planning intellectually" (pp. 220–221).
The myths about diversity (ugliness, congestion, ruinous uses) describe senile districts with too little diversity; genuine diversity is "a complex and highly developed form of order" (p. 222), and homogeneity poses the real aesthetic dilemma — monotony or "googie" exhibitionism (pp. 223–225). Zoning should control the scale of street frontage, not the kind of use (p. 234). "Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody" (p. 240).
Outstanding success destroys itself: winners of the competition for space duplicate the most profitable uses, crowding out the very diversity that created the location's value (the three banks at Broad & Chestnut; Eighth Street's restaurants; Greenwich Village's childless luxury conversions) (pp. 241–246). The remedy is "faulty feedback" repaired: zoning for diversity, "staunchness of public buildings," and competitive diversion (pp. 251–253).
Massive single uses cast "border vacuums": their perimeters are dead ends of use that spread blight inward street by street (pp. 257–262). The cure is Lynch's principle: make edges "a seam rather than a barrier, a line of exchange along which two areas are sewn together" (Lynch, quoted p. 267) — or confine the vacuum with "extraordinarily strong counterforces close by" (p. 269).
Slums: "The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast — and in the meantime dream of getting out" (p. 271). Slumming begins in dullness, not poverty; unslumming hinges on enough people staying by choice, uncrowding in place, and self-diversifying — "Cities grow the middle class" (p. 282). Clearance destroys precisely the unslumming neighborhoods, because their vitality contradicts Radiant Garden City ideals (p. 273).
Three kinds of money — conventional credit, government, and shadow-world loan money — all behave cataclysmically rather than gradually, "affording either searing droughts or torrential, eroding floods" (p. 293). "Credit-blacklisting maps, like slum-clearance maps, are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies" (p. 301). The North End's rehabilitation was financed by barter and hoard because the district was blacklisted (p. 295–296); the Back-of-the-Yards broke its blacklist by organizing depositors (p. 298). A national mortgage market, deliberately created in the mid-1930s, finances suburbia at cities' expense: "City people finance the building of suburbs" (p. 309).
Public housing's root error: people too poor to pay for shelter were redefined as "people who cannot be housed by private enterprise," a statistical group to be housed in income-sorted, government-owned projects (pp. 322–323). Jacobs proposes the guaranteed-rent method: government guarantees financing and economic rent to private owners of ordinary street buildings, with tenants selected locally and incomes examined annually — shelter as "a dignified, businesslike transaction" (p. 326). "Fix the buildings but leave the people" (Tankel, quoted p. 337).
Automobiles are a symptom, not the cause: "The more space that is provided cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars, and hence for still more space for them" (Gruen's calculation, p. 350) — erosion of cities is positive feedback. The alternative is attrition of automobiles by cities: "there is no absolute, immutable number of private automobile riders" (p. 362); Washington Square's road closure produced no surrounding traffic increase (pp. 360–362). Failure means "the purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles" (p. 371).
"A city cannot be a work of art" (p. 372): to design a city as art is to substitute art for life, and "the results… are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy" (p. 373). City design should instead clarify the intricate functional order with emphasis and suggestion — visual interruptions, landmarks, eye-catchers — "The mixture itself is kingpin, and its mutual support is the order" (p. 375).
Projects should be salvaged by reweaving: lay real streets in small blocks over the project ground, convert towers' bases to street uses, use vendors and guaranteed-rent row housing as diversity reservoirs, staff elevators with attendants, and abolish income ceilings (pp. 392–401). "This is, of course, the best way to salvage any kind of sorted-out project, up to the time it is actually built: Think better of it" (p. 404).
Big-city administration is "little-city government… stretched": vertical service empires plus random horizontal districts make locality coordination impossible; the invention needed is common administrative districts — the scale at which "planning for city vitality can be comprehended, coordinated and carried out" (p. 428). Citizens' experience is the missing intelligence: "It is like trying to eat through a pillow" (p. 414).
Cities are "problems in organized complexity" (p. 433): "situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways" (Weaver, quoted p. 433). orthodox planning mistook them for problems of simplicity (Howard's two variables) and then of disorganized complexity (statistics, averages, master plans). The working habits: think about processes; reason inductively; seek "unaverage" clues involving small quantities (pp. 439–440) — "It takes large quantities of the 'average' to produce the 'un-average' in cities" (p. 442).
Cities are nature: "The cities of human beings are as natural… as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters" (p. 443); sentimentalizing nature while bulldozing it is the same "simple mind" that "sees only disorder in the life of city streets" (p. 447). "Dull, inert cities… contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration" (p. 448).

Connections

Concepts: eyes-on-the-street · sidewalk-ballet · mixed-primary-uses · small-blocks · aged-buildings · unslumming · border-vacuums · self-destruction-of-diversity · organized-complexity · cataclysmic-money · public-characters · turf · in-between-densities · attrition-of-automobiles · separation-of-uses · gentrification · towers-in-the-park · urban-sprawl · new-urbanism · privatised-public-space · public-sphere · privacy · social-capital · housing · everyday-architecture · everyday-life · everyday-suburbanism

Authors: Jane Jacobs · Le Corbusier (the Radiant City as the book's principal target)

Debates: Dwelling vs. Housing · Spatial vs. Social Explanation

Related source notes:

High Street Diversity (Vaughan 2013) — the Jacobs-legacy study of high-street diversity; this book is its primary grounding.
Metropolitan hybrids (Luna 2018) — the contested commercialization of Jacobs's legacy (Quincy Market, Covent Garden) and the anti-monoculture rule.
Postmetropolis (Soja 2000) — Jacobs's Economy of Cities as Soja's synekism prototype; the Los Angeles that Jacobs here diagnoses as "togetherness or nothing" is Soja's postmetropolis two decades later.
Towers in the Park, Bungalows in the Garden (Keil 2015) — Keil's tower/bungalow sign-formula descends from the Garden City/Radiant City genealogy this book reconstructs.
Designing a Place Called Home (Wentling 2017) — the practitioner's later account of the same postwar production system Jacobs attacks from the street side.
Architectural purgatory (Morey & Alkanoglu 2018) — the garage/automobile side of the erosion thesis.
Public spheres (Solomon 2018) — street-level public life as the city's vital organ, in a different city.
Becoming Places (Dovey 2010) — place as becoming against Jacobs's foes' static plans.

Direct Quotes

"This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines." (p. 3)

"This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities." (p. 4)

"There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served." (p. 16)

"The first thing to understand is that the public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves." (p. 32)

"Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street." (p. 35)

"Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes." (p. 50)

"The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations." (p. 50)

"The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts." (p. 56)

"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." (p. 73)

"'Togetherness' is a fittingly nauseating name for an old ideal in planning theory. This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. 'Togetherness,' apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart." (p. 62)

"In real life, only from the ordinary adults of the city sidewalks do children learn — if they learn it at all — 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." (p. 82)

"You can neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it." (p. 100)

"Time, in cities, is the substitute for self-containment. Time, in cities, is indispensable." (p. 134)

"These networks are a city's irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated." (p. 138)

"Diversity is natural to big cities." (p. 143)

"The necessity for these four conditions is the most important point this book has to make." (p. 150)

"A Central Business District that lives up to its name and is truly described by it, is a dud." (p. 165)

"American downtowns are not declining mysteriously, because they are anachronisms, nor because their users have been drained away by automobiles. They are being witlessly murdered; in good part by deliberate policies of sorting out leisure uses from work uses, under the misapprehension that this is orderly city planning." (p. 172)

"New ideas must use old buildings." (p. 188)

"The economic value of new buildings is replaceable in cities. It is replaceable by the spending of more construction money. But the economic value of old buildings is irreplaceable at will. It is created by time." (p. 198)

"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody." (p. 240)

"The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so." (p. 271)

"The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast — and in the meantime dream of getting out." (p. 271)

"Cities grow the middle class." (p. 282)

"Credit-blacklisting maps, like slum-clearance maps, are accurate prophecies because they are self-fulfilling prophecies." (p. 301)

"City people finance the building of suburbs." (p. 309)

"It is no blessing to most of them, or to those who use them, to be surrounded by dullness or vacuity, let alone decay." (p. 258)

"The more space that is provided cars in cities, the greater becomes the need for use of cars, and hence for still more space for them." (p. 350)

"In real life… attrition of automobiles by cities is probably the only means by which absolute numbers of vehicles can be cut down." (p. 363)

"The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles." (p. 371)

"When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art." (p. 372)

"The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy." (p. 373)

"The most important visible manifestation of district administration would be the sight of people talking together without having first had 'arrangements to formulate a liaison.'" (p. 418)

"Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present 'situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.'" (p. 433)

"Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves." (p. 448)

Open Questions

Page-number provenance: this raw file is a digital full-text whose pagination was reconstructed from the Vintage edition's contents and index; quotes above carry Vintage page numbers where the index pins them, but a few (marked by content position) are approximate and should be verified against a physical copy before print use.
Jacobs's four conditions are stated as jointly necessary. Are they jointly sufficient? Her own "in-between" caveat (some high-density districts fail) and the Back-of-the-Yards exception (vitality below 100 dwellings/acre via political organization) suggest political power can substitute for physical condition — how far does that generalize?
Is the "self-destruction of diversity" a theory of gentrification avant la lettre? Jacobs describes winners crowding out diversity in Greenwich Village, Yorkville and the midtown East Side (p. 246) — two decades before the term crystallized. Does her remedy (zoning for diversity, tax adjustments, staunchness of public buildings) prefigure historic preservation/landmarking, or does it fail where the self-destruction is exactly what later scholarship calls the rent gap?
The book predicts: "many of the parts of today's cities in the worst, and apparently most baffling, trouble were suburbs or dignified, quiet residential areas not too long ago" (p. 16). Does Soja's postmetropolis — the Exopolis, the Fractal City — read as the confirmation of this forecast, and does Jacobs's framework survive contact with the postmetropolitan scale?
Her neighborhood-park argument (parks as "creatures of their surroundings") inverts the "More Open Space" fetish. How does this register interact with the wiki's welfare-state-housing and towers-in-the-park pages, where open space was the public project's equity instrument?
Jacobs defends dense cities against both the Garden City and the Radiant City, yet borrows Le Corbusier's density arithmetic to do it. Is her urbanism a critique of modernist form only, or of its density ideology as well?