The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

By Jane Jacobs
Unabridged
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“Jacobs’ once-revolutionary work about urban planning has become a classic…Donna Rawlins’s rich alto carries Jacobs’ detailed analysis magnificently. Rawlins understands she’s reading an important book. Occasionally, her voice expresses delight at one of Jacobs’ succinct, powerful observations. Rawlins’ presentation is always clear and consistent. Many important urban planning texts do not lend themselves to audio, but this wonderful book is an exception. Even those who have read it many times before will find it still worth a listen. Those new to the work will find listening a revelation.”

AudioFile

Winner of Sidney Hillman Prize, 1961

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context.  It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."  Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.  Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities.  It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable.  The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.