A Selective Summary of The Death and Life

Later this year marks the 50th anniversary of The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, published in 1961. And this May 4 marks what would be Jacobs's 95th birthday, which numerous cities will commemorate with Jane's Walks, including one in my own town. This has prompted me to look over the book again, and offer up a brief, selective summary.

Part I: The Peculiar Nature of Cities
A very anecdotal look at neighborhoods, parks, sidewalks with observations on the "ballet" of lively city life. Lays a lot of the groundwork for the rest of the book, but may not be so insightful to someone who's lived in a healthy urban environment before.

Part II: The Conditions for City Diversity
Four conditions are necessary for healthy, vibrant cities. These don't guarantee vigor and diversity of uses for an area, but vigor and diversity can't happen without them.

1 Mixed primary uses
A district must serve more than 1 primary uses (preferably more than 2), whose people use the same streets and facilities and different times of the day. There's economic efficiency in this re-use, which doesn't occur in a pure office district where people only go out during lunch hour, or a pure residential area where facilities are only used after 6pm.

2 Small blocks
Small blocks ensure that people traveling from point A to B have more paths to get there, encouraging more exploration. Businesses and neighbors on adjacent blocks are much more accessible than they would be on very long blocks. Drawings of Manhattan blocks on the west side illustrate how traffic is pushed off side streets and onto the avenues. In Rockefeller Center, the blocks have been shortened, allowing for more circulation.

3 Aged buildings
Buildings should vary in age and condition, including "plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings." The high cost of new buildings precludes a lot of businesses necessary to a healthy mix. (Studios, neighborhood bars, unusual restaurants, etc.) New ideas need old buildings. A large swatch developed at once is poor at creating diverse business, culture, and population. It decays as one over time, until it's deemed obsolete and the cycle is started again. A mixture of buildings is something a city can only inherit and sustain over the years.

4 Concentration
Despite density having a bad name among urban planners at the time, Jacobs gives examples in many cities of the most vital areas being far denser than the slums. High density often confused with overcrowding. How dense is appropriate? Under 6 dwellings per acre can make out well in suburbs. ~10-20 per acre makes a semi-suburb, which can work on the periphery (until it gets swallowed by a growing city.) 20+ per acre you can start getting city problems, but not the benefits. Around 100+ (depending on other factors) you start to get liveliness, safety, convenience, and interest. (Numbers rough-- numerical answer means less than a functional answer.)

Jacobs closes part two by countering some common myths about diversity: that it is ugly, invites ruinous uses, etc.

Part III: Forces of decline and regeneration


Self-destruction. How a successful district can naturally get killed by its own success, as the most lucrative primary use can crowd everything else out.

Border vacuums
She goes into great detail on how borders can hurt a district or city, especially the adjoining areas. The borders can be the canonical railroad tracks, the Cross-Bronx expressway being constructed, industrial sites, academic institutions, long empty blocks, or even large parks. Anything that disrupts the flow of people and makes them less inclined to keep walking. Some borders are necessary, but other city elements should be used to create lively, mixed territories, not unnecessary additional borders.

"Slum" clearance. Yep, a huge mistake. Caused more problems than it solved.

Gradual money vs cataclysmic money. Helping a district improve and evolve vs upending everything and creating more long-term problems.

Part IV: Different Tactics


Subsidizing dwellings. Instead of the government acting as builder and landlord.

Attrition of automobiles
Jacobs describes how we've gutted our cities to accommodate the automobile, but she goes to great pains to not vilify it. (Many pages devoted to how it's superior to the horse-and-buggy.) Should have replaced 6 horses with 1 car, instead of 1 horse with 6 cars. Discusses Ped/Auto separation schemes and their issues. Better just to reduce the dominance of cars and gradually reverse the cumulative effects of widened streets, increased parking, new expressways, etc., each step of which made sense on its own, but created a positive feedback loop with more cars and more gutting of the city.

When Washington Sq was closed to auto traffic in 1958, dire projections on increased congestion nearby proved false. Counts actually decreased slightly. There is no absolute, immutable number of drivers; they vary in response to other factors. Attrition of automobiles can occur by a gradual process of making conditions less convenient for cars. Widen sidewalks, increase ped crossings, reduce parking, make shorter blocks and thus have more crossings. (Today we might add curb extensions and gratuitous turns, lower speed limits, increase gas taxes.)

Visual order
"A city cannot be a work of art." The Radiant City, City Beautiful, etc. movements were "architectural design cults, rather than cults of social reform." A visual order can be established without complete control of the field of vision. To mitigate the inhuman-scale endless avenue effect of grids, introduce some irregular intersecting streets, but don't create dead-ends to foot traffic. Large buildings like Grand Central can be placed in some intersections; landmarks give orientation clues.

Salvaging housing projects
Remove the borders and reunite the project lands with the city. Place new streets and street-level buildings running through the empty spaces in projects. Introduce other uses besides residential to add diversity. Over the long term, look to disassemble them.

Governing and planning districts. Add a little more horizontal district administration, to give people a more local, accessible leverage point.