THE DEATH AND LIFE OF GREAT AMERICAN CITIES By: Jane Jacobs
"Witty, beautifully written--the culmination of Jacobs' previous thinking, and a step forward that deftly invokes a broader philosophical, even metaphysical, context." - Publishers Weekly
Modern Library Series
Modern Library
February 1993
624 pages ISBN: 0679600477 Hardcover (reprint) Add to Wish List
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.
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