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The Death and Life of Great American
Cities
Foreword to the Modem
Library Edition
by Jane
Jacobs
When I began work on
this book in 1958, I expected merely to
describe the civilizing and enjoyable
services that good city street life
casually provides-and to deplore
planning fads and architectural
fashions that were expunging these
necessities and charms instead of
helping to strengthen them. Some of
Part One of this book: that's all I
intended.
But learning and
thinking about city streets and the trickiness of
city
parks launched me into an
unexpected treasure hunt. I quickly found
that the valuables in plain sight --
streets and parks --were intimately
mingled with clues and keys to other
peculiarities of cities. Thus one
discovery led to another, then another.
Some of the findings from the
hunt fill
the rest of this book. Others, as they turned up,
have gone
into four further books.
Obviously, this book exerted an influence on
me, and lured me into my subsequent
life's work. But has it been
influential otherwise? My own appraisal
is yes and no.
Some people prefer doing
their workaday errands on foot, or feel they
would like to if they lived in a place
where they could. Other people
prefer
hopping into the car to do errands, or would like
to if they had a
car. In the old days,
before automobiles, some people liked ordering
up carriages or sedan chairs and many
wished they could. But as we
know from
novels, biographies, and legends, some people
whose
social positions required them to
ride --except for rural rambles --
wistfully peered out at passing street
scenes and longed to participate
in
their camaraderie, bustle, and promises of
surprise and adventure.
In a kind of
shorthand, we can speak of foot people and car
people.
This book was instantly
understood by foot people, both actual and
wishful. They recognized that what it
said jibed with their own
enjoyment,
concerns, and experiences, which is hardly
surprising,
since much of the book's
information came from observing and
listening to foot people. They were
collaborators in the research.
Then,
reciprocally, the book collaborated with foot
people by giving
legitimacy to what
they already knew for themselves. Experts of the
time did not respect what foot people
knew and valued. They were
deemed old-
fashioned and selfish --troublesome sand in the
wheels of
progress. It is not easy for
uncredentialed people to stand up to the
credentialed, even when the so-called
expertise is grounded in
ignorance and
folly. This book turned out to be helpful
ammunition
against such experts. But it
is less accurate to call this effect
Conversely, the book neither
collaborated with car people nor had an
influence on them. It still does not,
as far as I can see.
The case of
students of city planning and architecture is
similarly
mixed, but with special
oddities. At the time of the books publication,
no matter whether the students were
foot or car people by experience
and
temperament, they were being rigorously trained as
anticity and
antistreet designers and
planners: trained as if they were fanatic car
people and so was everybody else. Their
teachers had been trained
or
indoctrinated that way too. So in effect, the
whole establishment
concerned with the
physical form of cities (including bankers,
developers, and politicians who had
assimilated the planning and
architectural visions and theories)
acted as gatekeepers protecting
forms
and visions inimical to city life. However, among
architectural
students especially, and
to some extent among planning students,
there were foot people. To them, the
book made sense. Their
teachers (though
not all) tended to consider it trash or
house rambling
found its way
onto required or optional reading lists
--sometimes, I
suspect, to arm students
with awareness of the benighted ideas they
would be up against as practitioners.
Indeed, one university teacher
told me
just that. But for foot people among students, the
book was
subversive. Of course their
subversion was by no means all my doing.
Other authors and researchers --notably
William H. Whyte -- were
also exposing
the unworkability and joylessness of anticity
visions. In
London, editors and writers
of The Architectural Review were already
up to the same thing in the mid-1950s.
Nowadays, many architects, and some
among the younger generation
of
planners, have excellent ideas --beautiful,
ingenious ideas --for
strengthening
city life. They also have the skills to carry out
their
plans. These people are a far cry
from the ruthless, heedless city
manipulators I have castigated. But
here we come to something sad.
Although
the numbers of arrogant old gatekeepers have
dwindled with
time, the gates
themselves are another matter. Anticity planning
remains amazingly sturdy in American
cities. It is still embodied in
thousands of regulations, bylaws, and
codes, also in bureaucratic
timidities
owing to accepted practices, and in unexamined
public
attitudes hardened by time.
Thus, one may be sure that there have
been enormous and dedicated efforts in
the face of these obstacles
wherever
one sees stretches of old city buildings that have
been
usefully recycled for new and
different purposes; wherever sidewalks
have been widened and vehicular
roadways narrowed precisely
where they
should be -- on streets in which pedestrian
traffic is
bustling and plentiful;
wherever downtowns are not deserted after
their offices close; wherever new,
fine-grained mixtures of street uses
have been fostered successfully;
wherever new buildings have been
sensitively inserted among old ones to
knit up holes and tatters in a
city
neighborhood so that the mending is all but
invisible. Some
foreign cities have
become pretty good at these feats. But to try to