Life and Death of Great

¶ … life and death of great American cities" by Jane Jacobs

Response Paper: Jane Jacobs' the Death and Life of Great American Cities

In an era such as our own, where even suburbs are becoming increasingly urbanized, the title of Jane Jacobs' the Death and Life of Great American Cities may seem curious. How are cities dying when fewer and fewer Americans live in rural areas? But upon deeper perusal of her work it becomes clear that the death that Jacobs is talking about is a cultural and spiritual death, the death of an American residential institution near and dear to her heart and life, not merely where people are relocating their lives and livelihoods in numerical terms.

Jacobs criticizes the rise of highly specified city 'neighborhoods' which have been to the detriment of a city's collective character. Instead of public squares, which encouraged the intermingling of different cultural and socioeconomic classes in past eras, the structure and modern economy of cities creates individualized, rather than blended communities. Cities should be characterized by small, short blocks, buildings should not be standardized, and rather than spread out like suburbs, the population of those blocks must be dense. Population density makes cities safer, as "intricate" and "unconscious" public controls and standards are often even more effective than policing (32). Shared community standards are often why neighborhoods of similar demographics very close to one another can have widely different crime rates. The kindness of strangers is one of the marvels of city life. But as people become more and more segregated, to neighborhoods, to enclosed areas, even to sidewalks while the streets are dominated by cars, people lose a sense of connection and ownership of an area and cease to care about their neighborhoods and neighbors.

Architecturally, old buildings should be saved, rather than struck down in the name of progress. Architectural diversity contributes to functionality of neighborhoods, creating multiple-user locations that encompass Chinese restaurants, clothing stores, and other things that people in the area really need as opposed to what urban planners tell them they need (198). There should be public parks and common areas, as "the more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually and economically its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity" (111). Cities are described in terms of chessboards, in which every player has a different function, from health food stores to cultural meccas, but the diversity leads to community strength. Quite sensibly, Jacobs points out that if residential areas are 'decontaminated' and cultural sites are shifted to other city areas, residents of the city will cease to frequently use these locations, the institutions' living cultural uses will decline, and tourists and museum-piece events will take over to target one-time users (168-169).

Jacobs wrote her work as a challenge to the stultifying ethos of urban planning of her day, which attempted to predict the movements of people, and create a cohesive appearance rather than to let the natural, discursive nature of urban life to work its magic. Highly regimented urban planning also isolates lower-income individuals within their own enclaves, removing them from the vibrant opportunities and enrichment of the commerce of the rest of city life. Urban planners tend to have a hostile view of cities, seeing them as ugly places, or places that should resemble towns or suburbs.