You can sign an online message of condolence at our website, to accompany the actual neighbourhood book of condolence which is at Dooney’s Cafe, a neighbourhood landmark she helped save when Starbucks first came to The Annex.

http://www.JaneJacobs.TYO.ca

Thanks.

I believe that is not an accurate assement at all. Jacobs belived that there must be rules for city building and while there need not be a great many rules, rules there must be. She by no means urged any sort of anarchy.

Indeed, it’s not really clear what a statement like “leave the cities alone and let them develop by themselves” could actually mean. Cities don’t develop by themselve. Individuals and various corporate entities—people—are the actors and there must be some set of rules by which they organize and coordinate their activities. For example, Jacobs wasn’t fighting Robert Moses because he was an urban planner but simply because he was implementing some bad plans.

Maybe. Maybe not.

Thanks Joel. (Amazon thanks you too.)

Death and Life… is a wonderful book, of course: chock full of observation/insight. Opening a page at random (p. 234), I see: “No special form of city blight is nearly so devastating as the Great Blight of Dullness.”

Of course, I wonder how effective the manipulated use of her ideas is? We have just endured the installation of one of those “city street” malls (urban planners/architects are welcome to provide actual nomenclature), in which fake-antique iron lamps are installed on red-brick streets along which a Wal-Mart shares space with small restaurants, coffee shops, liquor stores, hair salons, etcetera. The problem? You couldn’t walk to this place if you tried, as it’s bound by major four-to-six lane streets. I suppose I like this set-up better than Minnesota’s blight to American retail, the mall—and then The Mall… but it’s no substitute for the kind of organic life of a city like SF or NY (or Twin Cities experiments like Grand Avenue’s dual-use zoning & others in St. Paul).

Jacobs, typically, gave warning against such catastrophes (and also gave a nice precis of her thinking) in Dark Age Ahead:

“Let things grow. Don’t let currently powerful government or commercial enterprises strangle new departures, or alternatively gobble them as soon as they show indications of becoming economic successes. Stop trying to cram too many eggs in too few baskets under the keeping of too few supermen (who don’t actually exist except in our mythos).”

Finally, as to Alexander: his Notes on the Synthesis of Form is, to my mind, his best book (though I haven’t read the new, even more expensive (!) than Pattern Language volumes, series. Notes is one of those little books, like Simon’s The Sciences of the Artifical or Trow’s In the Context of No Context that make you weep, nearly, in appreciation for their compact intelligence.

I was going to mention “A Pattern Language” as the other book that has most infouenced the way I think about cities and the built environment. So, yeah.

your insights into the amerikan metropolis were spot on.

(The author identified Christopher Alexander’s work as the logical next step, which is interesting, although I don’t know anything about his impact outside of software development.)

“The scenes that illustrate this book are all about us. For illustrations, please look closely at real cities. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.”