The Death and Life of Great American Cities

I am reading a book called The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It was written in 1961 by Jane Jacobs, and goes into great and vivid detail about the pieces that make up a successful city. I am enjoying it immensely for a number of reasons. One is that it is very, very well-written and full of clear thought and excellent examples, such as a story about a family who bought a piece of farm land out in the country with the intention of building on it. Before they had the money to do so, they would go out to the land and picnic there on a lovely grassy knoll. When they were able to build on the land, they built their house upon the grassy knoll, thus destroying one of the features they loved most about their land.

This was used as an example for how cities can destroy their most successful neighborhoods, simply by doubling down on the element for which the neighborhood is well known, thus squashing out all of its other uses and people and dooming the neighborhood to becoming a shell of what it used to be.

I am also struck by how many great lessons there are to take away from this book beyond the realm of city planning. One such lesson is how easy it is for “the way things are” to be taken for granted as god-given and totally inevitable. In talking about how the current state of cities came to be, Jacobs says, “We thought it would be good for us. And we got it.” Great systems were put in place not because they were inevitable, but because at some time, somewhere, someone thought they were a good idea. She also quoted Holmes, saying something to the effect that “The inevitable only comes about by great effort.”

This isn’t a good ending to this blog post, but … I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the book.