The Death and Life of Great American Cities

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

• Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time
• The Image of the City (Harvard-MIT Joint Center for Urban Studies Series)
• Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier
• Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream
• The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape
• Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
• The Economy of Cities
• Dark Age Ahead
• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York
• Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design