The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effects of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.” 

This passage cautions against oversimplifying the problems facing modern cities. Automobiles are easy to vilify. As Jacobs points out, however, the real problems are of a more complex, socio-economic nature. 

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretend order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” 

Jacobs is critical of the false order imposed on urban settings by planners, who demolish entire neighborhoods and replace them with neat, modern buildings. She hints at an order that exists beneath the apparent chaos of slums. Urban designers should support this underlying order, critical to the functioning of cities, and strengthen it.

“His aim was the creation of self-sufficient small towns, really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.” 

This passage is a direct critique of Ebenezer Howard, the English architect who spearheaded the Garden City Movement. Howard (and other like-minded urban theorists) preferred razing large swathes of cities to examining how they worked because their ideal settlements were essentially anti-urban. Jacobs derides this anti-urban stance. She also objects to the imbalances she sees in the field of urban planning. Residents must be involved in decisions regarding their communities, not just planners. 

“The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts.” 

This quote addresses the importance of casual interaction in cities. Such interactions create social cohesion by fostering a sense of belonging. Individual interactions may seem trivial, but together, they help create vibrant communities. Car dependency in low-density developments minimizes the possibility of casual interaction. 

“You can neither lie to a neighborhood park, nor reason with it. ‘Artist’s conceptions’ and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighborhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.”

Parks are integral to the vitality of cities. In this passage, Jacobs asserts that planned green spaces are ineffective for their designed purposes. In order to function, parks should originate and operate organically. The must be integrated into the surrounding urban fabric. 

“The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.” 

The success of a park depends directly on the diversity of uses and users of the surrounding urban environment. The two are not independent. Rather, they are interdependent.

“Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, ‘neighborhood’ is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of towns or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.” 

Jacobs is critiquing the push for the modernization of cities by planners who have an idealized, sentimental view of small towns and suburbs. Planners insist on rebuilding cities following non-urban models, while simultaneously ignoring the rich benefits urban settings have to offer, notably, their rich diversity.

“On successful city streets, people must appear at different times.” 

Jacobs makes a strong case for the benefits of primary mixed use. Offices ought to exist alongside residences, shops, and public parks. If a neighborhood is to thrive, it must be active day and night. Ongoing activity at different times improves safety, creates business opportunities, and offers residents the services they need.

“[F]requent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among users of a city neighborhood. Frequent streets are not an end in themselves. They are a means toward an end.”

One of the truisms of orthodox planning is that city streets are wasteful. Although urban designers create promenades and malls that incorporate streets at reasonable intervals, these streets are meaningless because they lack a good cross-section of people to use them. Frequent streets and short blocks attract mixed users, which in turn results in the growth of diversity. In other words, the means by which frequent streets and short blocks work and the results they engender are inextricably linked. The relationship is reciprocal.

“Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.” 

This passage appears in a section addressing the economics of urban construction. Existing enterprises, which are necessary for the health and vitality of a city, can thrive in old buildings, but go out of business in new ones because of the high costs of new construction. 

“Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule […] The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually, it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell.”

In this passage, Jacobs implicitly compares planned neighborhoods to vibrant cities that grow and evolve over the course of time. The latter are flexible, the former static. Neighborhoods need a mixture of newer and older buildings in order to accommodate a variety of uses, income levels, and ideas. Planned neighborhoods built at a single moment in time produce a conformist, homogeneous, and sterile urban environment. 

“Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.” 

Detroit serves as a negative exemplum in Jacobs’s book. She discusses the myriad problems facing the city, including the lack of diversity of its downtown area, which empties after work hours, and its low-density sprawl. According to Jacobs, the failure of Detroit is a consequence of bad urban planning.

“There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.”

Jacobs warns against building instant neighborhoods, not just because they are visually generic, but also because they stifle the all-important diversity one encounters in vibrant cities. A neighborhood built at one time will reflect a single moment of thinking. When the range and variations in buildings decline, diversity of population and enterprises are also apt to decline.

“Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.” 

Congestion occurs when people are thinly settled and where diverse uses are infrequent. The lack of concentrated diversity forces people into automobiles for almost all their needs. The creation of more roads and parking exacerbates the problem, leading to an even greater reliance on vehicles.

“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.” 

Diversity is a salient feature of urban life. Racial, cultural, and economic differences are as apparent as they are when one travels to a foreign country.

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” 

Jacobs is hostile to contemporary urban planners. She promotes a less centralized, participatory approach to urbanism, one that relies heavily on community input.

“The root trouble with borders, as city neighbors, is that they are apt to form dead ends for most users of city streets. They represent, for most people, most of the time, barriers.” 

Borders break the circuit of human activity and thus deaden urban vitality. They create gaps in the streetscape that discourage foot traffic even over relatively short distances. Borders are not just major arteries or train tracks. Large single-use buildings, parking lots, and even large parks can be equally intrusive.

“Conventional planning approaches to slums and slum dwellers are thoroughly paternalistic. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.” 

The paternalists to which Jacobs is referring are urban planners and policy makers, such as Robert Moses. Jacobs critiques the conventional practice of razing slums to build anew. She argues that slums should be improved, not demolished. Moreover, slum residents are capable of understanding and acting upon their own interests and should play a key role in the renewal of their neighborhoods.

“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.” 

New buildings do not solve problems. Human thought, ingenuity, and effort solve problems. Urban planners rely too heavily on their designs, at the expense of community input.

“Downtowns and other neighborhoods that are marvels of close-grained intricacy and compact mutual support are casually disemboweled.” 

This passage highlights the impact of cars on densely built urban neighborhoods. The creation of traffic arteries and parking structures voids these areas of dwellings and businesses, resulting in a blurring of distinct neighborhood characteristics. 

“To unslum, public housing projects must be capable of holding people by choice when they develop choice (which means they must become gladly attached before they have choice).”

Mixed income neighborhoods are necessary to the formation of thriving communities. It is not enough simply to allow upwardly mobile tenants to remain in public housing after they exceed income limits, they must be encouraged to stay. Physical and economic improvements, coupled with addressing safety and public nuisance issues, are key to salvaging public housing projects.

“There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world’s champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time, probably the world’s most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.” 

Jacobs is deeply critical of American society, which protects select parts of nature, often for sentimental reasons, while simultaneously destroying others. The act of protecting frees people from the guilt of their unsustainable activities. For instance, protecting a park or a natural reserve with set boundaries essentially frees people to conduct less sustainable activities outside those boundaries. Scholars call this fortress conservation, which refers to the bounding of wild lands, rather than their integration into inhabited areas. 

“Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance. But vital cities are not helpless to combat even the most difficult problems.” 

Urban planners conventionally blame high density for crime, blight, and a host of other problems. Jacobs distinguishes between high density and overcrowding. She argues that density alone does not produce healthy communities, but it can yield to a critical mass of people capable of supporting more vibrant communities.