Jane Jacobs. "The Death and Life of Great American Cities"....Summary for chapters 1-3

This blog is basically my thoughts about 3 chapters of Jane Jacobs’s book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".

First a little information about Jane Jacobs:

She was born in May 1916. She was an American-Canadian writer and her primary interest was communities and urban planning.

She was well known for her efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods. In this book she attacks on the current city planning and re building in the United States. 

This book’s title is pretty simple. "Life and Death of Great American Cities", how could a city live or die? Well, its pointing to the fact that how could cities be great and how could they be not so good. The definition of cities being good or bad is a broad topic. Cities that are good could be categorized in how clean it is, how active it is, how much attraction it has, how big is the growth and etc.

As Jane Jacob says in her book "Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design". Well that's true because if all the decision makers were able to implement the lesson learned from successful cities into their own cities then most of their problems would be solved.

Chapter 2 and 3 are mostly about usage of sidewalks and its safety. In my opinion sidewalks plays an important role in a livability and greatness of a city. Not only sidewalks connect roads but it also connects people, connects culture, attracts other people to the city and over all it keeps a city alive.

For example let’s think about Pearl District in Portland Oregon. When I walk in that area I feel the connection between people, shops, restaurants and its all there. Also it’s safe. As Jane Jacobs describe how eyes of people are on streets and if anything happens someone will see it, either a bar tender at a restaurant or a store manager or even a resident in one of the apartments.