Death And Life Of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs may have been far ahead of her time in her ideas on city planning when she wrote, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When she wrote this book in 1961 she bluntly opens her book stating that the book “is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding” [Jacobs, 5] and that in the book she wants to “attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning” [Jacobs, 5]. Right from the start Jane Jacobs makes a very bold statement about current planning practices and education process. She continues on to highlight how little aspects of city planning can be changed to create drastic positive changes for

Jane Jacobs tries to redefine the orthodox planning theory that the idea neighborhood size is 7,000 residents. She believes that having such a small neighborhood make self- governance, which is crucial for a neighborhood, is next to near impossible. Self- governance is important so that the residents of a neighborhood can maintain a society and imagine that is shared by the majority. When there are only 7,000 residents in a neighborhood Jane Jacobs believes that self- governance is impossible because there will be too many strongly grounded, different ideal and opinions that will make coming to a common idea will never happen. Jane Jacobs focuses on looking at the larger aspect of the neighborhoods as how a neighborhood actually affects a city, and actually that smaller neighborhoods do not play much of role in the city as a whole. She considers that looking at the city as a whole, street neighborhoods or larger neighborhood districts of 100,000 or more residents are what city planners need to focus on to allow self- governance to

City and neighborhood cycles tend to destroy the diversity and can be a vicious cycle that harms the city or neighborhood. By understanding the different types of cycles one can start to come up with possible solutions to curb these issues. There are four different types of city or neighborhood cycles. The first type of cycle is the issue of a homogeneous district. A homogeneous district means all the residents in an area share similar, if not the same, social and economic characteristics/ status. A homogeneous district is a type of city cycle that destroys the diversity in an area and creates serious issues if gentrification or “foreign” resident tries to infiltrate the area. The existing residents that are all the same try to force out the “different” or “foreign” people by buying out whatever they own to restore the homogeneity to the area. This cycle destroys all diversity and does not create any sort of character to an area, which can harm a cities