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 tra...
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.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities的创作者
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Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her father was a physician and her mother taught school and worked as a nurse. After high school and a year spent as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, Jacobs went to New York, where she found a succession of jobs as a stenographer and wrote free-lance articles about the city's many working districts, which fascin...
Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her father was a physician and her mother taught school and worked as a nurse. After high school and a year spent as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, Jacobs went to New York, where she found a succession of jobs as a stenographer and wrote free-lance articles about the city's many working districts, which fascinated her. In 1952, after a number of writing and editing jobs ranging in subject matter from metallurgy to a geography of the United States for foreign readers, she became an associate editor of Architectural Forum. She was becoming increasingly skeptical of conventional planning beliefs as she noticed that the city rebuilding projects she was assigned to write about seemed neither safe, interesting, alive, nor good economics for cities once the projects were built and in operation. She gave a speech to that effect at Harvard in 1956, and this led to an article in Fortune magazine entitled "Downtown Is for People," which in turn led to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book was published in 1961 and produced permanent changes in the debate over urban renewal and the future of cities.
In opposition to the kind of large-scale, bulldozing government intervention in city planning associated with Robert Moses and with federal slum-clearing projects, Jacobs proposed a renewal from the ground up, emphasizing mixed use rather than exclusively residential or commercial districts, and drawing on the human vitality of existing neighborhoods: "Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their difficulties.... Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves." Although Jacobs's lack of experience as either architect or city planner drew criticism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was quickly recognized as one of the most original and powerfully argued books of its day. It was variously praised as "the most refreshing, provocative, stimulating, and exciting study of this greatest of our problems of living which I have seen" (Harrison Salisbury) and "a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to the city" (William H. Whyte).
Jacobs is married to an architect, who she says taught her enough to become an architectural writer. They have two sons and a daughter. In 1968 they moved to Toronto, where Jacobs has often assumed an activist role in matters relating to development and has been an adviser on the reform of the city's planning and housing policies. She was a leader in the successful campaign to block construction of a major expressway on the grounds that it would do more harm than good, and helped prevent the demolition of an entire neighborhood downtown. She has been a Canadian citizen since 1974. Her writings include The Economy of Cities (1969); The Question of Separatism (1980), a consideration of the issue of sovereignty for Quebec; Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), a major study of the importance of cities and their regions in the global economy; and her most recent book, Systems of Survival (1993).
Modern Library(共44册)，
这套丛书还有
《Out of Africa》《The Mysterious Island》《Don Quixote》《The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects》《Ulysses》
等
。
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《美国大城市的死与生（the Death and Life of Great American Cities）》出版于1961年，从此后就变成建筑界、城市规划领域最著名的书之一。我的学生时代一直感到奇怪，怎么一本各个老师都会提起的书却从来没在图书馆里看到。原来上世纪八十年代，清华大学的汪坦教授曾主持翻译...
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![[美国] 简·雅各布斯](https://img1.doubanio.com/img/author/medium/public/1523368023.89.jpg)
简·雅各布斯 作者
离净语
Vintage1992版
嘎嘣嘎嘣脆
译林出版社2006版
Di
译林出版社2006版
0 有用 王璞一零一 2017-11-30 08:25:44
大致翻了翻。美国城市问题只能是作为一个参照吧。
0 有用 葱油酥饼 2020-02-07 07:12:48
Jacobs说有2个重要特征使市区变的特殊：个性（描绘出区域的特殊历史和自然资源）和人民（被它的向心性和群体活动吸引而来的场所），不得不说在当时是是相当牛逼的理论，并且现在看这个表述也是没问题的，然鹅结合后续造成的影响来看就……
1 有用 uh duh 2011-08-28 04:14:49
this book changed my whole idea of thinking about "Good" city! everyone interested in Architecture or City Design should definitely read this!!
0 有用 eastforest1986 2010-03-03 10:15:17
我看她最后还是输给了robert moses
0 有用 Jacqueline 2016-03-06 02:34:21
力荐！相对于其他Situationist大而空的批判，Jane Jacob这位和蔼的老太太自身没有任何学历背景，仅仅是由日常生活的思考汇聚成的这本书，反而成为了对现代城市规划最好的批判性反思。书中所举的例子繁琐但生动，特别是“芭蕾街区”等活灵活现的词语很完美的展现了所谓客观的规划是如何一步一步和我们的日常生活合为一体这一惊人但有趣的事实。
0 有用 葱油酥饼 2020-02-07 07:12:48
Jacobs说有2个重要特征使市区变的特殊：个性（描绘出区域的特殊历史和自然资源）和人民（被它的向心性和群体活动吸引而来的场所），不得不说在当时是是相当牛逼的理论，并且现在看这个表述也是没问题的，然鹅结合后续造成的影响来看就……
0 有用 王璞一零一 2017-11-30 08:25:44
大致翻了翻。美国城市问题只能是作为一个参照吧。
0 有用 Jacqueline 2016-03-06 02:34:21
力荐！相对于其他Situationist大而空的批判，Jane Jacob这位和蔼的老太太自身没有任何学历背景，仅仅是由日常生活的思考汇聚成的这本书，反而成为了对现代城市规划最好的批判性反思。书中所举的例子繁琐但生动，特别是“芭蕾街区”等活灵活现的词语很完美的展现了所谓客观的规划是如何一步一步和我们的日常生活合为一体这一惊人但有趣的事实。
1 有用 uh duh 2011-08-28 04:14:49
this book changed my whole idea of thinking about "Good" city! everyone interested in Architecture or City Design should definitely read this!!
0 有用 eastforest1986 2010-03-03 10:15:17
我看她最后还是输给了robert moses