50
Used, New, and Out of Print Books - We Buy and Sell - Powell's Books
Cart |
|  my account  |  wish list  |  help   |  800-878-7323
Hello, | Login
MENU
  • Browse
    • New Arrivals
    • Bestsellers
    • Featured Preorders
    • Award Winners
    • Audio Books
    • See All Subjects
  • Used
  • Staff Picks
    • Staff Picks
    • Picks of the Month
    • Bookseller Displays
    • 50 Books for 50 Years
    • 25 Best 21st Century Sci-Fi & Fantasy
    • 25 PNW Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books From the 21st Century
    • 25 Memoirs to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Global Books to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Women to Read Before You Die
    • 25 Books to Read Before You Die
  • Gifts
    • Gift Cards & eGift Cards
    • Powell's Souvenirs
    • Journals and Notebooks
    • socks
    • Games
  • Sell Books
  • Blog
  • Events
  • Find A Store

Don't Miss

  • Powell's Picks of the Season
  • The Best Books of 2023
  • Powell's Author Events
  • Oregon Battle of the Books
  • Audio Books

Visit Our Stores


Kelsey Ford: Twelve Days of Horror (0 comment)
While putting this post together, I realized that the original song this is based on, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” needs very little amending to become horrific: why is someone gifting their lover so many different kinds of birds? That can’t be safe? But we love notching the horror up whenever we can, so in our version of the song...
Read More»
  • Keith Mosman: Best Books of 2023: Audiobooks (0 comment)
  • Powell's Staff: New Literature in Translation: November 2023 (0 comment)

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##

Death & Life of Great American Cities

by Jane Jacobs
Death & Life of Great American Cities

  • Comment on this title
  • Synopses & Reviews
  • Read an Excerpt

ISBN13: 9780679741954
ISBN10: 067974195X



All Product Details

View Larger ImageView Larger Images
Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$19.00
New Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
16Burnside
1Cedar Hills
1Hawthorne
20Local Warehouse

From Powells.com

25 Women to Read Before You Die

The writers your life won't be complete without.


Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy. Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.

Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

Review

"Jane Jacobs has become more than a person. She is an adjective." Toronto Life

Review

"The liveliness of her mind is a joy to behold, as is her common sense and a prose style uncluttered with the litter of empty jargon...her book is well and timely met." The Globe and Mail

Review

"This is vintage Jane Jacobs: quietly authoritative, profoundly accessible, and disdainful of the blinkered viewpoints of academic theorists." The Calgary Herald

Review

"The most refreshing, provocative, stimulating and exciting study of this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense." Harrison Salisbury, The New York Times

Review

"One of the most remarkable books ever written about the city...a primary work. The research apparatus is not pretentious — it is the eye and the heart — but it has givien us a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city." William H. Whyte, author of The Organization Man

Synopsis

Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and keenly detailed, a monumental work that provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of this great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense. --The New York Times

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured.

In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.


About the Author

Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her father was a physician and her mother taught school and worked as a nurse. After high school and a year spent as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, Jacobs went to New York, where she found a succession of jobs as a stenographer and wrote free-lance articles about the city's many working districts, which fascinated her. In 1952, after a number of writing and editing jobs ranging in subject matter from metallurgy to a geography of the United States for foreign readers, she became an associate editor of Architectural Forum. She was becoming increasingly skeptical of conventional planning beliefs as she noticed that the city rebuilding projects she was assigned to write about seemed neither safe, interesting, alive, nor good economics for cities once the projects were built and in operation. She gave a speech to that effect at Harvard in 1956, and this led to an article in Fortune magazine entitled "Downtown Is for People," which in turn led to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book was published in 1961 and produced permanent changes in the debate over urban renewal and the future of cities.

In opposition to the kind of large-scale, bulldozing government intervention in city planning associated with Robert Moses and with federal slum-clearing projects, Jacobs proposed a renewal from the ground up, emphasizing mixed use rather than exclusively residential or commercial districts, and drawing on the human vitality of existing neighborhoods: "Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties....Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves." Although Jacobs's lack of experience as either architect or city planner drew criticism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was quickly recognized as one of the most original and powerfully argued books of its day. It was variously praised as "the most refreshing, provocative, stimulating, and exciting study of this greatest of our problems of living which I have seen" (Harrison Salisbury) and "a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city" (William H. Whyte).

Jacobs is married to an architect, who she says taught her enough to become an architectural writer. They have two sons and a daughter. In 1968 they moved to Toronto, where Jacobs has often assumed an activist role in matters relating to development and has been an adviser on the reform of the city's planning and housing policies. She was a leader in the successful campaign to block construction of a major expressway on the grounds that it would do more harm than good, and helped prevent the demolition of an entire neighborhood downtown. She has been a Canadian citizen since 1974. Her writings include The Economy of Cities (1969); The Question of Separatism (1980), a consideration of the issue of sovereignty for Quebec; Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), a major study of the importance of cities and their regions in the global economy; and her most recent book, Systems of Survival (1993).


What Our Readers Are Saying

Be the first to share your thoughts on this title!




Product Details

ISBN:
9780679741954
Binding:
Trade Paperback
Publication date:
12/01/1992
Publisher:
PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE
Pages:
480
Height:
1.22IN
Width:
5.26IN
Thickness:
1.25
Number of Units:
1
Copyright Year:
1992
Series Volume:
85
UPC Code:
2800679741956
Author:
Jane Jacobs
Author:
Jane Jacobs
Subject:
Government and political science
Subject:
City planning -- United States.
Subject:
Urban renewal -- United States.
Subject:
Architecture-Urban Planning
Subject:
Urban policy -- United States.
Subject:
City and state planning and urban development

Ships free on qualified orders.
Add to Cart
$19.00
New Trade Paperback
Ships in 1 to 3 days
Add to Wishlist
QtyStore
16Burnside
1Cedar Hills
1Hawthorne
20Local Warehouse
Used Book Alert for book Receive an email when this ISBN is available used.

This title in other editions

  • New, Hardcover, $25.00
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Pinterest
  • Instagram

  • Help
  • Guarantee
  • My Account
  • Careers
  • About Us
  • Security
  • Wish List
  • Partners
  • Contact Us
  • Shipping
  • Transparency ACT MRF
  • Sitemap
  • © 2023 POWELLS.COM Terms

{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##
{1}
##LOC[OK]## ##LOC[Cancel]##