The Death and Life of Great American Cities: an Introduction to Jane Jacobs

Few books have had as significant an impact on popular thinking about their subjects as Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which set forth a series of concepts—”mixed-use,” “sidewalk ballet,” “organized complexity,” and “eyes on the street,” to name a few—that established the terms in which urban policy is often still discussed. In her relentless criticism of “orthodox” planning, her skeptical attitude towards state bureaucracies, and her proposals for alternative ways of knowing the city, Jacobs posed a vociferous critique of the condescending paternalism of midcentury welfare states and suggested new ways of thinking about the relationship between the design of cities and the experiences of people living there. Yet, as critics have been quick to point out, the “organic” and “self-organizing” principles that Jacobs extolled over and against the orthodoxy of central planning partake of a logic akin to the neoliberal market, and self-emerging systems are not necessarily systems capable of self-governance when it comes to matters of racial and economic diversity and sustainability. How can we understand Jacobs’ interventions, both cherished and derided, in their specific social and historical context? In what are her concepts rooted, and, when taken as an ensemble, what contradictions might they produce? What, broadly speaking, is the relationship of city planning to the economic forces that shape and reshape urban spaces? 

In this course, we will take a critical approach to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, attempting, on the one hand, to recover the living Jacobs through her best-known work and, on the other, to trace its legacies among celebrants and critics alike. What was Jacobs’ definition of a city? How do we come to know and understand them? What, in her view, made a city “live”—and also “die”? As we read, we will pay particular attention to certain aporia in Jacobs’ work, asking: what was her relationship to race? Where does she fit among feminist theorists of urban social space? What is the relationship between Jacobs’ ideas and the relentless march of gentrification? And what of Jacobs’ thinking can we take with us into the 21st century? Can her ideas help us act politically to get the kind of city we want? And what kind of city is that?