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The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Death and Life became the most famous book on urban planning. It is fundamentally about the natural origins and benefits of “the spontaneous order.” Written a third of a century after Euclid normalized centralized planning, Death and Life rejected that precedent, arguing that throughout human history, cities had been built on spontaneity, with mill... See more

What’s Next for Jane Jacobs' Sidewalk Ballet?

Jane Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities

Steven Johnson • Where Good Ideas Come From

Author and activist Jane Jacobs argued that cities thrive when they mingle “everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets.”

Brendan Boyle • Spain's fix for a lonely planet

sjsu.edu

No neighborhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled, and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity. Furthermore, a neighborhood or district perfectly calculated, it seems, to fill o

Jane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities

How Progressives Froze the American Dream

Yoni Appelbaum theatlantic.com

Public housing is not properly an end in itself. It can only be justified as a means to an end of making our cities fit places in which to live. What kind of public housing should it be?…The tenant’s rent should be increased with his increase in income and he should not be evicted as an over-income tenant. When his increasing rent reaches the point

Jane Jacobs • The Death and Life of Great American Cities

To generate exuberant diversity in a city’s streets and districts, four conditions are indispensable: 1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for dif