Jane Jacobs and Me
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Revisited
The Story
About six months ago, a colleague sent me an email message asking if I would like to join him for a program he was thinking of proposing for the upcoming annual conference of the Minnesota Chapter of the American Planning Association. He thought it would be interesting and fun to revisit Jane Jacobs’ famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and I agreed. Since he and I are of a similar vintage, I volunteered to round up a couple of other folks who could bring some different perspectives to our little panel. We all loved the idea of the program—and the challenge: To go back and re-read a book we had read years, if not decades, before, and think and talk about what it means to each of us today. We enjoyed meeting in a coffee shop to share our experiences with the book, and when we presented at the conference, we offered four completely different takes on Jane Jacobs and her ideas, leading to interesting questions and comments during Q&A, and some engaging conversations afterwards. To frame our talk, we had agreed that we would each respond to a handful of prompts, starting with my favorite, “your first contact with Death and Life” (you’ll learn why below), and leading to “How it influences your thinking and work today.” Here’s my take.1
The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published in 1961, and I was born in the fall of 1962. When I entered architecture school seventeen years later, in 1980, I was required to take a freshman seminar, so I chose the one that seemed most relevant to my career path: “Thinking About Cities.” Unfortunately, I also took the advice I heard repeated all around the architecture school by students and faculty, that design studio (six credits per semester, M, W, F, 2-6 PM, for five years) was the most important course, and you shouldn’t spend too much time on any of your other courses. For a creative type who found design to be addictive, it was easy to follow this advice, but it meant all-nighters and “uneven” performance in my other classes. Thinking About Cities was held in the dining room of a beautiful building that was once the home of the university’s first president. It was a privilege to meet in that room, and it was also very civilized and intimate, with a dozen students sitting around a conference table, but when I nodded off and started snoring and drooling, it was hard to conceal. I straightened out a little after the instructor took me aside and said to me,
“If you fall asleep in my class one more time, I’m going to ride you out on a rail.”2
But I never really kept up with the reading, didn’t contribute much to class discussions, and my papers were last-minute, late-night productions of middling quality at best.
We read two important books that semester, Death and Life and Kevin Lynch’s influential The Image of the City, published the year before, in 1960. I was frantically pounding out my final paper for the class on my portable electric Smith Corona typewriter in the middle of finals week—onionskin and pink eraser bits everywhere—when, on December 8th, John Lennon was murdered. A few people ran around the dorms wondering if finals would be cancelled to allow us all to grieve, but no such luck. I got a “C” in Thinking About Cities, read parts of both books, and, thankfully, I was not ridden out on a rail. Twenty years later, I returned to school for a graduate degree in city planning, and although I probably had to read a chapter or two for one course or another, I don’t recall reading much more Jacobs. Now, for those reasons, and with most of my planning career in the rear-view mirror, I felt motivated by this upcoming panel to challenge myself to read the whole book, cover to cover, once and for all.3
The Theory
Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 and died in 2006. She wrote seven books on cities, politics, political economy, and other related subjects; several books on other topics, including an illustrated children’s book; and at least five biographies have been written about her. Death and Life was her biggest success by far, having sold over a quarter of a million copies to date and remaining in print continuously since 1961. I won’t bother with summarizing her 448-page book or trying to convince you that I am any sort of Jane Jacobs scholar; rather, I’ll just remind you of the four critical ingredients required for vibrant urbanism that Jacobs promotes in Death and Life: Density, varied buildings, mixed uses, and short blocks. There is a lot more to the book, obviously, but it all supports these four ideas.
For our panel discussion, another of our prompts was to choose a favorite Jane Jacobs quote. Mine comes at the beginning of Chapter 8, “The need for mixed primary uses:”
“The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.”4
Here’s why I picked that quote: I moved to Minneapolis in 2003, and while the central business district was pretty busy Monday through Friday, it was slower at night and on weekends. For over half a century, city planners had deliberately concentrated commercial high-rise offices in a ten-block-square area, surrounded first by parking garages and then surface parking. This approach created a coherent skyline and efficient transit and commuting system, but there was no housing, so retail and dining were dependent on office workers. The 1956 completion of Southdale Center, one of the first new suburban “regional malls” in the country, began to draw downtown department stores away, as did the subsequent completion of other regional malls in other surrounding first-ring suburbs. The final nail in the coffin was the 1992 completion of one of the first “mega-malls,” the Mall of America, just 12 miles south of downtown. Meanwhile, the city’s second-level Skyway system had developed into a sprawling, one-mile-square enclosed and conditioned class B, service-oriented retail center offering everything from food, banking, and pharmacies to tailors, copy centers, gift shops, shoe repair places, and shoeshine stands. While indispensable in winter, the development of the skyway system doubled the amount of downtown retail space, whether or not there was enough demand for it, hobbling street-level shopping and the outdoor pedestrian experience.
And then came Covid. As “work from home” became the norm, Downtown Minneapolis, like many other cities with single-purpose central business districts, became a ghost town. Then, when the pandemic started to abate in 2021, The Wall Street Journal published an article about how Philadelphia had bounced back first and fastest with increased street life and retail demand while other central business districts around the country remained empty.5 Why? In Center City Philadelphia, residential buildings, retail shops, bars, and restaurants are mixed with commercial office buildings, forming a vibrant, diversified urban neighborhood (Boston bounced back faster, too, for the same reasons). Having lived in Philadelphia for 17 years, this was no surprise to me, and it would not surprise Jane Jacobs either. Indeed, for the past three years, I have been telling my planning students that they have a once-in-a-lifetime career opportunity to spend the next 20-30 years figuring out how to convert Minneapolis’s and most of America’s single-purpose, Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five, central business districts into 24/7 mixed-use urban neighborhoods. Our next downtowns—if they are to be successful—will offer not just office space, but all kinds of rental and ownership housing (market rate, affordable, senior, supportive); bars, restaurants, hotels, arts and culture institutions, and sports facilities; healthcare facilities, senior care, day care, and pet care; and even educational facilities, from pre-k through college. Imagine, for example, the many benefits of living in a senior housing apartment downtown, where you can take the elevator to the second floor to visit all these things—from a doctor to the pharmacy to a continuing education class, followed by lunch with friends—all from the Skyway—without having to step outside…and slip and fall on the ice in mid-January. [5]
The Lesson
My own reaction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 45 years after I first started reading it and having just finally finished it last week, is that Jane Jacobs got it about 98% right in 1961, and her observations remain wise, prescient, and relevant today. I have always suspected that a lot of people (I am projecting from my own experience) don’t get past “eyes on the street” and page ~150, but having actually read the whole thing this time around, I was amazed by the clarity, accuracy, and wisdom of her economic analyses and arguments, as well as her proposals for how best to mix humans with automobiles and trucks, and how to design better political and bureaucratic systems that would support district-level strategies, rather than centralized planning. Jacobs declared war on orthodox planning, arguing for a bottom-up, inductive approach based upon street-level observation and empirical research, over a top-down, deductive approach based on grand yet unproven theories and designs. She was right then and is still right today. While much has changed since 1961, the book remains as fresh as when it was published, almost 65 years ago. Anyone involved in city building owes it to themselves to read and reread The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I encourage you to start now.
I’ll close by offering special thanks to my fellow panelists, Phil Carlson, Lauren Anderson, and Denetrick Powers, and to everyone who attended our conference session and shared their thoughts, stories, and experiences of Jane Jacobs and The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
“The pseudoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.”
—Jane Jacobs, 1961
A great book, like a great man, “is a strategic point in the campaign of history, and part of its greatness consists in being there.” For all its weaknesses, Jane Jacobs has written such a book. Readers will vehemently agree and disagree with the views; but few of them will go through the volume without looking at their streets and neighborhoods a little differently, a little more sensitively. After all, it is the widespread lack of such sensitivity, especially among those who matter, which is perhaps what is most wrong with our cities today.”
- Lloyd Rodwin, The New York Times, Nov. 5, 1961
Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, New York: Random House, 1961.
Riding the rail (also called being “run out of town on a rail”) was a punishment most prevalent in the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries in which an offender was made to straddle a fence rail held on the shoulders of two or more bearers. The subject was then paraded around town or taken to the city limits and dumped by the roadside. Wikipedia.
Lynch, Kevin, The Image of the City, Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1960. See also my personal favorite, Caro, Robert, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, New York: Knopf, 1974.
Jacobs, Death and Life, page 152.
Calvert, Scott, “Philadelphia’s Center City Sees Resurgence in Housing, Economic Activity,” in The Wall Street Journal, 8 December 2022.