Death and life of great american cities epub

Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition. It is first of all a work. Penetrating analysis of the functions and organization of city neighborhoods, the forces of deterioration and regeneration, and the necessary planning innovations.

In this classic text, Jane Jacobs set out to produce an attack on current city planning and rebuilding and to introduce new principles by which these should be governed.

The result is one of the most stimulating books on cities ever written. Throughout the post-war period, planners temperamentally unsympathetic to. Biography of Jane Jacobs , American-Canadian activist and publicist.

With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city. Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and.

Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the s. As the legend. A new book by influential urbanist Jane Jacobs, released in Jacobs' centenary, and showing her evolution as a writer and thinker. Vital Little Plans will bring together for the first time a selection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs.

These works shed light on the. All three books created revolutions in their respective spheres of. Building on the success of its second edition, the third edition of the Sustainable Urban Development Reader provides a generous selection of classic and contemporary readings giving a broad introduction to this topic.

With a group of young observers, camera and notebook in hand, he conducted pioneering studies of street life, pedestrian behavior, and city dynamics. City: Rediscovering the Center is the result of that research, a humane, often amusing view of what is staggeringly obvious about the urban environment but seemingly invisible to those responsible for planning it. Whyte uses time-lapse photography to chart the anatomy of metropolitan congestion.

Why is traffic so badly distributed on city streets? Why do New Yorkers walk so fast—and jaywalk so incorrigibly? Why aren't there more collisions on the busiest walkways? Why do people who stop to talk gravitate to the center of the pedestrian traffic stream?

Why do places designed primarily for security actually worsen it? Why are public restrooms disappearing? It is difficult to design an urban space so maladroitly that people will not use it, but there are many such spaces.

The future is not in the suburbs, he believes, but in that center. Like a Greek agora, the city must reassert its most ancient function as a place where people come together face-to-face.

Visionary thinker Jane Jacobs uses her authoritative work on urban life and economies to show us how we can protect and strengthen our culture and communities. In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions.

The decay of these pillars, Jacobs contends, is behind such ills as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor; their continued degradation could lead us into a new Dark Age, a period of cultural collapse in which all that keeps a society alive and vibrant is forgotten.

But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Jacobs draws on her vast frame of reference -- from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to zoning regulations in Brampton, Ontario -- and in highly readable, invigorating prose offers proposals that could arrest the cycles of decay and turn them into beneficent ones. Wise, worldly, full of real-life examples and accessible concepts, this book is an essential read for perilous times.

Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the s.

As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to level her Greenwich Village neighborhood and then to drive a highway through it.

Jacobs's most effective weapons in these David-versus-Goliath battles, and in writing her book, were her powers of observation and common sense.

What is missing from such discussions and other myths about Jacobs, according to Peter L. Laurence, is a critical examination of how she arrived at her ideas about city life.

Laurence shows that although Jacobs had only a high school diploma, she was nevertheless immersed in an elite intellectual community of architects and urbanists. Becoming Jane Jacobs is an intellectual biography that chronicles Jacobs's development, influences, and writing career, and provides a new foundation for understanding Death and Life and her subsequent books. Laurence explains how Jacobs's ideas developed over many decades and how she was influenced by members of the traditions she was critiquing, including Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell, shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, housing advocate Catherine Bauer, architect Louis Kahn, Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, urban historian Lewis Mumford, and the British writers at The Architectural Review.

Rather than discount the power of Jacobs's critique or contributions, Laurence asserts that Death and Life was not the spontaneous epiphany of an amateur activist but the product of a professional writer and experienced architectural critic with deep knowledge about the renewal and dynamics of American cities. A new book by influential urbanist Jane Jacobs, released in Jacobs' centenary, and showing her evolution as a writer and thinker.

Vital Little Plans will bring together for the first time a selection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs. These works shed light on the development of the ideas she made famous in her best-known works, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities, while expanding upon familiar themes with new insights.

Some works also explore topics rarely directly addressed in her major works, from skyscrapers to feminism to universal health care to gentrification. Readers will find classics like her breakout article "Downtown Is for People" and a host of previously unpublished or obscure articles, speeches, and lectures that follow her entire career, from her early journalistic investigations into the specialty industries of New York City and the neighbourhoods that harboured them, to her critiques of the urban renewal regime, to her iconoclastic takes on economics, separatism, regulation, and the environment.

Most importantly, it will reveal Jacobs as she herself wished to be understood: as a writer who tried to observe human life as closely as she could.

The book showcases the rhythm of Jacobs' career. In "How New Work Begins," she explores the economic foundations of flourishing city life, and the environmental and political implications of city growth. All three books created revolutions in their respective spheres of influence, and nothing affected city planning and architecture -- or the way we think about how life is lived in densely packed urban centers -- more than Jane Jacobs's far-sighted polemic.

Here is the first book for young people about this heroine of common sense, a woman who never attended college but whose observations, determination, and independent spirit led her to far different conclusions than those of the academics who surrounded her. Illustrated with almost a hundred images, including a great number of photos never before published, this story of a remarkable woman will introduce her ideas and her life to young readers, many of whom have grown up in neighborhoods that were saved by her insights.

It will inspire young people -- and readers of all ages -- and demonstrate that we learn vital life lessons from observing and thinking, and not just accepting what passes as "conventional wisdom. Building on the success of its second edition, the third edition of the Sustainable Urban Development Reader provides a generous selection of classic and contemporary readings giving a broad introduction to this topic.

It begins by tracing the roots of the sustainable development concept in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, before presenting readings on a number of dimensions of the sustainability concept. Topics covered include land use and urban design, transportation, ecological planning and restoration, energy and materials use, economic development, social and environmental justice, and green architecture and building.

All sections have a concise editorial introduction that places the selection in context and suggests further reading. Additional sections cover tools for sustainable development, international sustainable development, visions of sustainable community and case studies from around the world. The book also includes educational exercises for individuals, university classes, or community groups, and an extensive list of recommended readings. The anthology remains unique in presenting a broad array of classic and contemporary readings in this field, each with a concise introduction placing it within the context of this evolving discourse.

The Sustainable Urban Development Reader presents an authoritative overview of the field using original sources in a highly readable format for university classes in urban studies, environmental studies, the social sciences, and related fields.

It also makes a wide range of sustainable urban planning-related material available to the public in a clear and accessible way, forming an indispensable resource for anyone interested in the future of urban environments.

The sixth edition of the highly successful The City Reader juxtaposes the very best classic and contemporary writings on the city to provide the comprehensive mapping of the terrain of Urban Studies and Planning old and new.

The City Reader is the anchor volume in the Routledge Urban Reader Series and is now integrated with all ten other titles in the series. This edition has been extensively updated and expanded to reflect the latest thinking in each of the disciplinary areas included and in topical areas such as compact cities, urban history, place making, sustainable urban development, globalization, cities and climate change, the world city network, the impact of technology on cities, resilient cities, cities in Africa and the Middle East, and urban theory.

The new edition places greater emphasis on cities in the developing world, globalization and the global city system of the future. The plate sections have been revised and updated. Sixty generous selections are included: forty-four from the fifth edition, and sixteen new selections, including three newly written exclusively for The City Reader.

The sixth edition keeps classic writings by authors such as Ebenezer Howard, Ernest W. The anthology features general and section introductions as well as individual introductions to the selected articles introducing the authors, providing context, relating the selection to other selection, and providing a bibliography for further study.

The sixth edition includes fifty plates in four plate sections, substantially revised from the fifth edition. In this book, Jane Jacobs, building on the work of her debut, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, investigates the delicate way cities balance the interplay between the domestic production of goods and the ever-changing tide of imports.

Using case studies of developing cities in the ancient, pre-agricultural world, and contemporary cities on the decline, like the financially irresponsible New York City of the mid-sixties, Jacobs identifies the main drivers of urban prosperity and growth, often via counterintuitive and revelatory lessons.

Jane Jacobs, writing from her adoptive country, uses the problems facing an independence-seeking Quebec and Canada as a whole to examine the universal problem of sovereignty and autonomy that nations great and small have struggled with throughout history. In the s and s, Scranton was a place of enormous diversity and opportunity. Small businesses of all kinds abounded and flourished, quality public education was available to and supported by all, and even recent immigrants could save enough to buy a house.

Opposing political parties joined forces to tackle problems, and citizens worked together for the public good. Through interviews with contemporary Scrantonians and research of historic newspapers, city directories, and vital records, author Glenna Lang has uncovered Scranton as young Jane experienced it and shows us the lasting impact of her growing up in this thriving and accessible environment.

Jane Jacobs's famous book The Death and Life of Great American Cities has challenged the discipline of urban planning and led to a paradigm shift. Controversial in the s, most of her ideas became generally accepted within a decade or so after publication, not only in North America but worldwide, as the articles in this volume demonstrate.

Based on cross-disciplinary and transnational approaches, this book offers new insights into her complex and often contrarian way of thinking as well as analyses of her impact on urban planning theory and the consequences for planning practice.

Now, more than 50 years after the initial publication, in a period of rapid globalisation and deregulated approaches in planning, new challenges arise. The contributions in this book argue that it is not possible simply to follow Jane Jacobs's ideas to the letter, but instead it is necessary to contextualize them, to look for relevant lessons for cities and planners, and critically to re-evaluate why and how some of her ideas might be updated. Jane Jacobs is history's most celebrated urban critic.

In addition to her classic, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs authored another half dozen influential books on urban planning, economics, and design. She was also a tireless advocate of vibrant city neighborhoods. Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs offers students, enthusiasts, and critics unprecedented insights into the work of this seminal thinker. Originally published in , and continually sought after ever since, this edition includes a new introduction by distinguished urban scholar Mary Rowe.