The Death And Life Of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, in the chapter “The kind of problem a city is” from her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” explains the three stages of development in the history of scientific thought including (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity. She goes on to describe how the realization of the appropriate category of scientific thought can impact different professional domains in their problem solving efforts. She provides an example of how the field of life sciences rightly realized that its problems are of organized complexity and focused on elucidations taking into account such organized nature of concerns. Conversely, the author points out

Challenges, in any filed of study, can be evaluated through both qualitative and quantitative approaches. Although qualitative methods used for understanding a community’s needs, desires, characteristics, and shortcomings, serve as essential tools in developing a city, representation of these qualitative factors to gain validation is a painstaking task. With the development of statistical methods that enable us to quantify a city’s qualities or characteristics, the reliance on such numeric data as proof of accuracy has increased considerably. Even when the qualitative data is more accurate and credible, its authenticity is subjected to higher skepticism compared to that of quantitative data. Although characteristics of cities can be very well defined by qualitative methods, the lack of a quantifiable metric to support such characteristics questions the validity of the qualitative information. Much to the author's criticism, planners' over-reliance