The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Having read The Power Broker and then Wrestling with Moses, the story of Jane Jacobs’ struggle with Robert Moses, it seemed only logical to follow up with Jacobs’ own The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Death and Life is a big book, but Jacobs helpfully summarizes her prescription for healthy cities in four points.

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 different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.

2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.

3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.

4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there. This includes dense concentration in the case of people who are there because of residence.

Death and Life was first published in 1961, yet many of its observations seems startlingly current. On page 180, she argues the importance of social capital, an idea developed at length in Robert Putnam’s 2001 book Bowling Alone. Here is Jacobs:

If self-government in [a good city neighborhood] is to work, underlying any float of population must be a continuity of people who have forged neighborhood networks. These networks are a city’s irreplaceable social capital. Whenever the capital is lost, from whatever cause, the income from it disappears, never to return until and unless new capital is slowly and chancily accumulated.

In a chapter called “Gradual Money and Cataclysmic Money,” Jacobs describes the devastating effects of Robert Moses-style big-money development projects. She contrasts this with the positive impact of money invested gradually over time, which helps add the new businesses and housing stock a neighborhood needs without uprooting the people and destroying the businesses and human connections already there. It’s a philosophy now summed up in the Slow Money movement.

Jacobs’ comments on the use of eminent domain for the benefit of private enterprise would also be very familiar to those involved in the battle over the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn (a few blocks from where I live). She quotes the following from a 1960 report to the mayor by management expert Anthony J. Panuch.

A druggist purchased a drug store for more than $40,000. A few years later, the building in which his store was located was taken in condemnation. The total sum which he eventually received was an award of $3,000 for fixtures and that sum had to be paid over to the chattel mortgagee. Thus his total investment was completely wiped out.

If taxpayers were made to pay the cost of these developments rather than those whose homes and businesses are in the way, she argues, it would be obvious how unprofitable they are.

It is nice, to see, by the way, that the Modern Library was not too stuffy to use the charming cover photo of the author enjoying a cigarette in a local bar. However you feel about alcohol and tobacco, it’s an excellent illustration of the informal, ever-changing social contacts that make a neighborhood safe and interesting.