The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)
by Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)
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Book Summary Information

Author: Jane Jacobs
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1993-02-09
ISBN: 0679600477
Number of pages: 624
Publisher: Modern Library

Book Reviews of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)

Book Review: A 'Must Have" for a student of Urban Studies
Summary: 5 Stars

My son is a college senior who is taking a seminar class in urban studies. He was born in Manhattan so it was not a surprise that he should develop an interest in the subject. While I was purchasing another 'leisure read' to send to him, I saw this book as a suggested other possibility. It got very high marks in all the reviews and I thought it would be a great addition to his collection of books in this area. I was not wrong. He loved the book and when he brought it to class, his professor was delighted that he had a copy and called it "the classic for studies of cities". He has even introduced me to Jane Jacobs' work as he reads more and more of this book. I hope to read it from cover to cover when he brings it home from college later this year.

Summary of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Modern Library Series)


Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

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