The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jacobs' book is an attack on “orthodox” modern city planning and city architectural design.
Looking into how cities actually work, rather than how they should work according to urban
designers and planners, Jacobs effectively describes the real factors affecting cities, and
recommends strategies to enhance actual city performance.
Part 1

Jacobs briefly explains influential ideas in orthodox planning, starting from Howard’s Garden
city, indeed a set of self-sufficient small towns, ideal for all but those with a plan for their
own lives. Concurrently, City Beautiful was developed to sort out the monuments from the
rest of the city, and assemble them in a unit. Later Le Corbusier devised the Radiant City,
composed of skyscrapers within a park. Jacobs argues that all these are irrelevant to how
cities work, and therefore moves on to explain workings of cities in the first part of the book.
She explores the three primary uses of sidewalks: safety, contact, and assimilating children.
Street safety is promoted by pavements clearly marking a public/private separation, and by
spontaneous protection with the eyes of both pedestrians and those watching the continual
flow of pedestrians from buildings. To make this eye protection effective at enhancing
safety, there should be “an unconscious assumption of general street support” when
necessary, or an element of “trust”. As the main contact venue, pavements contribute to
building trust among neighbors over time. Moreover, self-appointed public characters such
as storekeepers enhance the social structure of sidewalk life by learning the news at retail
and spreading it. Jacobs argues that such trust cannot be built in artificial public places such
as a game room in a housing project. Sidewalk contact and safety, together, thwart
segregation and racial discrimination.
A final function of sidewalks is to provide a non-matriarchy environment for children to play.
This is not achieved in the presumably “safe” city parks - an assumption that Jacobs seriously
challenges due to the lack of surveillance mechanisms in parks. Successful, functional parks
are those under intense use by a diverse set of companies and residents. Such parks usually
possess four common characteristics: intricacy, centering, sun, and enclosure. Intricacy is the
variety of reasons people use parks, among them centering or the fact that parks have a
place known as their centers. Sun, shaded in the summer, should be present in parks, as well
as building to enclose parks.
Jacobs then explores a city neighborhood, tricky to define for while it is an organ of self-
governance, it is not self-contained. Three levels of city neighborhoods; city, districts, and
streets, can be identified. Streets should be able to effectively ask for help when enormous
problems arise. Effective districts should therefore exist to represent streets to the city. City
is the source of most public money – from federal or state coffers.
Part 2

Given the importance of all kinds of diversity, intricately mingled in mutual support, part two
of the book explains the conditions for city diversity or the economic workings that produce
lively cities. First, districts must serve more than one primary function to ensure presence of
people using the same common facilities at different times. Second, blocks should be short,
to increase path options between points of departure and destinations, and therefore
enhance social and as a result economic development. Third, buildings should be at varying
ages, accommodating different people and businesses which can afford different levels of
rents. Fourth, there should be a dense concentration of people, including residents, to
promote visible city life. It is important that all of these four conditions are necessary to
generate diversity, and absence of each one would result in homogeny and ultimately
dullness.
Jacobs refutes the myths about disadvantages of diversity presented in orthodox planning.
First she argues that diversity does not innately diminish visual order. Conversely, homogeny
or superficially diverse-looking homogeneous areas lack beauty. Moreover, diversity is not
the root cause of traffic congestions, which is caused by vehicles and not people in
themselves. Lively, diverse areas encourage walking. Diversity is not permissive to ruinous
uses- if defined correctly- either. A category of uses contributing nothing to a district’s
general convenience, such as junk yards, grow in unsuccessful spots. In fact, to make these
areas successful and thereby dispose of such ruinous uses, diversity should be enhanced. A
second category of conceived ruinous uses such as bars and theaters are a threat in grey
areas, but not harmful in diverse city districts. The final category includes parking lots, large
or heavy truck depots, gas stations, gigantic outdoor advertising and enterprises harmful
due to their wrong scale in certain streets. Jacobs suggests that exerting controls on the
scale of street frontage permitted to a use would alleviate such a use.

Part 3

Part three of the book is designated to analyzing four forces of decline and regeneration in
city cycles: successful diversity as a self-destructive factor, deadening influence of massive
single elements in cities, population instability as an obstacle to diversity growth, and effects
of public and private money.
Self destruction of outstanding successful districts occurs by ousting less affluent dwellers
and businesses, to replace them with more affluent or profitable ones, probably as the
multiplication of those already existing in that district. This not only erodes the variety of
dwellers and businesses as the base for diversity in that specific district, but also has a cross-
effect on the diversity of other localities by depriving them from such profitable businesses
and affluent residents needed for mutual support. Massive single facilities such as railroad
tracks, enormous parks, and college campuses create vacuums in areas immediately next to
their borders because such areas (adjoining borders) are a terminus of generalized use.
Jacobs suggests to figure out border-line cases, such as special park uses (chess or checker
pavilions), in order to blend the border and the immediate neighboring area together and
yet keep the city as city and the massive element (such as the park) as itself.
Population instability is the third factor in the life cycle of cities. For instance, the reason that
slums remain slums is the unstable population of residents there, ready to get out when they
have the choice. Therefore, Jacobs suggests that the real slumming process, as opposed to
slum shifting through renewal projects or slum immuring practices of orthodox planning, is
to make slum dwellers desire to stay and develop neighborhoods. This could possibly be
done by gradual incremental monies which make continual improvements in the quality of
lives of individual residents of slums.
The last factor is public and private money. Jacobs argues that money has its limitations,
incapable of buying inherent success for cities lacking the success factors. She classifies
money into 3 forms: credit extended by traditional, non-governmental lending institutions,
money provided by government through tax receipts or borrowing power, and money from
the underworld of cash and credit. Jacobs argues that despite the differences, these three
kinds of money behave similarly in one regard: They shape cataclysmic, rather than gradual,
changes in cities. She matches the cycles in city districts with these types of money: “First
the withdrawal of all conventional money, then ruination financed by shadow-world money;
then selection of the area by the Planning Commission as a candidate for cataclysmic use of
government money to finance renewal clearance”. These cataclysmic monies, in the absence
of gradual money, waste city districts which are indeed fit for city life and possess a potential
for rapid improvements.

Part 4

Part four of the book is dedicated to effective tactics to actually improve city performance.
These include: subsidized dwellings, attrition of automobiles as opposed to erosion of cities
by cars, improvement of visual order without sacrificing diversity, salvaging projects, and
redesigning governing and planning districts.
Jacobs suggests subsidized dwellings be offered to those who cannot afford normal
housing. Unlike the current practice in which the government acts as the landlord, these
people can and should be housed by private enterprises in regular buildings, not projects.
The government guarantees a rent to the landlords. Tenants pay subsidized rents, calculated
based on their income level, and the government pays the difference. This way, under
circumstances that tenants’ incomes increase, they are not forced to leave, for their rents
would be adjusted. Therefore, diversity would be enhanced by keeping those wishing to
remain at their choice. Tenants might be encouraged to stay by letting them own the house
gradually, after years of paying rents. Jacobs admits that there are potentials for corruption,
but argues that corruption grows as the target of corruption remains unchanged. Thus, she
suggests that methods of subsidized dwelling be revised and varied every eight or ten years.
Cities offer multiple choices. However, one cannot take advantage of this fact without being
able to get around easily. Thus, accommodating city transportation is important, and this
should not destroy the related intricate and concentrated land use. She proposes tactics of
giving room to other desired city uses which compete with automobile traffic needs such as
widening sidewalks for street displays which would narrow the vehicular roadbed and
thereby automatically reduce car use, and traffic congestion. Jacobs argues that visual
cohesiveness should not be regarded as a goal. She stresses the importance of the visual
announcement that a high number of streets would make by picturing an intense life. On the
down side, if such streets go on and on to the distance, the intricacy and intensity of the
“foreground” appears to be repeated infinitely. Therefore the endless repetition and
continuation should be hampered, by introducing visual irregularities and interruptions into
the city scene, such as irregular street patterns with bends, special buildings, etc.
Finally Jacobs argues that cities are a problem of organized complexity. Unlike simple two-
variable or disorganized-complexity problems of statistical randomness, problems of
organized complexities are composed of numerous interrelated factors. Therefore,
horizontal structures in city planning would work better than vertical structures, which aim
at oversimplifying problems of such complexity.