num_pages: 624
description: Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  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.
language: English
title: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
titlecomplete: The Death and Life of Great American Cities
genres: Sociology, History, Urbanism, Architecture, Cities, Design, Urban Studies, Politics, Urban Planning, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 16510
awards: awardedAt: -252432000000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Nonfiction
publisher: Modern Library