The Death and Life of Great American Cities – Introduction

As this is the first entry in my smogr book club: The Death and Life of Great American Cities I would be interested in responses from my reader on how useful this is, and if there are any changes to the format would help out. Most of my book notes are noted for posterity and contain many quick thoughts (not necessarily insights).
The introduction is divided up into two parts: Thesis statement and History of “Orthodox Planning.” In the first half, Jacobs marshals many different anecdotal examples of city life, both positive and negative. Jacobs instantly goes on the offensive in order to position The Death and Life of Great American Cities as a direct attack on the status quo.
Book Notes

  • pg 9 – Morningside Heights and Slum Clearance
  • pg 9 – Attacks Ebenezer Howard, the Garden City, City Beautiful, & Modernism not by name but alludes to it
  • pg 10 – Not anti-car but car isn’t the main problem but a symptom
    I don’t know if I buy this, but I could take her word for it. I don’t know if she fully realized how much cheap personal transportation influenced and reinforced American culture
  • pg 11 – Mentions the North End of Boston
  • pg 16 – Mentions the West End of Boston and how the Northenders were afraid they would be wiped off the map and cleared of slums like what was done to the West End.
    By the way, the West End is completely horrible place to be, and whatever they did to that area is a crying shame. The giant hospital doesn’t help at all either.
  • pg 16 – Bankers make bad planners
    side note: this is try today, cf: the housing bubble and the acceleration of the suburbs
  • pg 19 – Thesis Statement
  • pg 19 – City needs diversity
  • pg 20 – Mentions Harlem Housing and the rectangular lawn _the man_ “gave” the people
  • pg 22 – Yesterday’s suburbs are todays slums

Now onto a history of Orthodox Planning.
Two strains:

  1. Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Corbusier’s Radiant City – European theory and reaction to European slums (Howard) and the atrocities of World War I (Corbusier)
  2. Burnham’s City Beautiful – American excess and optimism

Book Notes

  • pg 23 – Orthodox Planning
  • pg 24 – Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City
  • pg 24 – Manifested in USA in model company towns
    aside: are there any modern company towns today??
  • pg 26 – Howard’s planning – “He conceived of good planning as a series of static acts.”
  • pg 27 – Attacks “The Decentrists” – Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Henry Wright, Catherine Bauer. This was Bauer’s term.
  • pg 27 – design of the city not by the street but by the block and superblock
    I wonder if the effects of the “2nd Industrial Revolution” in the greater efficiencies and economies of scale which were becoming possible in the latter half of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries is the root cause. Making capitalism more efficient was something which was a long time coming and there is no reason why building and the city wouldn’t see itself be unaffected.
  • pg 28 – Planned communities fenced off by farmland or parks held in trust. Paternal, daddy knows best.
  • pg 29 – Le Corbusier makes his entrance
  • pg 30 – Radiant City as utopia much like Howard’s Garden City
  • pg 31 – Radiant City acceptance due, in part, by his designing (for the first apparent time) for the automobile in the 1920’s.
  • pg 32 – Urban Renewal as the love child between Garden City and Radiant City
  • pg 32 – Columbian Exposition in Chicago.
    Burnham’s Paris on Lake Michigan
  • pg 33 – City Beautiful
    Civic Center as a disparate element in the city, like fair
  • pg 34 – List of failed Civic Centers
  • pg 34 – Sorting of culture out from city; Lincoln Center

Further Research

  • Bank lending leading to urban decay
    History, Redlining, Racism
  • Historical Utopias
    Garden City, Radiant City, City Beautiful, Burnham’s Chicago Plan
  • Frank Lloyd Wright’s agrarian city plan – Broadacre
    FLLW’s 1 acre per person utopia, and why don’t we hear about it at all?