The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Cities offer multiplicity of choice, but users cannot benefit from this diversity fully without adequate transportation and communication. Thus, easing traffic congestion is key to improving cities. Major roads, parking lots, and gas stations carve through densely built areas and break up city streets, hindering foot traffic and street life. They create a characterless sprawl outside cities, which Jacobs describes as Noplaces. According to Jacobs, however, cars are not the only problem. Ideas about cities are equally to blame, especially those of traditional planners.

Traffic separation plans devised to relieve downtown congestion envision either a horizontal or vertical division of uses. The former places cars outside and pedestrians in the middle, while the latter puts automobiles below and pedestrians above, or vice versa. Both approaches hinge on a reduction in the absolute number of cars on the roads, combined with an increase in public transportation. Such plans, however, pose insurmountable problems. For example, pedestrian schemes, whether horizontal or vertical, need convenient places for service vehicles. Solutions range from creating underground tunnels for trucks and taxis, to developing “a system of central sorting for all freight and other deliveries within a zone” (346), otherwise known as post-officing. Both proposals involve considerable expense.

Jacobs warns of oversimplifying the traffic problem. Unlike conventional planners, she focuses on pedestrians, rather than separation. She recommends reducing car domination by narrowing streets because automobile attrition “operates by making conditions less convenient for cars” (363). She also proposes putting a stop to sidewalk erosion by widening them, which would enable street displays. Strategically located car-free areas with paving that merges the street and the sidewalk also figure in her plan. As Jacobs points out, solutions to car attrition must be multipronged, and even then, changes will be slow to come.

This chapter addresses the aesthetic dimensions of cities. Cities need visual order, but this order should not come at the expense of diversity. For Jacobs, visual cohesiveness is not an end goal, but rather, a visible announcement of a vibrant neighborhood.

Looking back to 18th-century romanticism, 19th-century Utopians rejected urbanized society and promoted notions of the noble and simple natural environment. The Utopians in turn impacted modern urban movements, such as the Garden City, which combined this romanticized view of nature with ideas of harmony and order imposed by authoritative town planners. Jacobs characterizes these movements as “primarily architectural design cults, rather than cults of social reform” (375). Modern planning aimed from its inception to turn cities into disciplined works of art. The visual order they imposed on cities drew on art, rather than drawing on the order of life. Jacobs seeks to replace this rigid, art-based order with “a strategy of illuminating and clarifying life [that] help[s] to explain to us its meanings and order” (375), an approach that demands seeing “complex systems of functional order as order” (375). Order does not revolve around a single city element. Rather, one finds order in the mixture of elements comprising the city.

According to Jacobs, intricate and vibrant use gives cities structure. Planners can clarify this order through emphasis and suggestion. Planners do not need absolute control over an urban area to create visual order. If they make suggestions, users will create their own order. For example, a street with many buildings, stores, and signs communicates that an area is vibrant. It makes a visual announcement that “this is an intense life and that into its composition go many different things” (378). It functions as inanimate evidence of diversity and activity. To bring visual order to streets, one has to create strong visual impressions. Visual irregularities and interruptions, including irregular street patterns with bends, plazas, and visually distinctive buildings, should replace endless repetition. As Jacobs aptly notes, the “absence of any visual climax of dignifying object says Unimportance” (387).

A salient characteristic of housing projects is their abstraction from the regular urban environment. They are set apart and thus suffer from the problems associated with separation, such as blight and lack of safety. In this chapter, Jacobs argues that projects can be salvaged, but only if planners stop treating them as discrete areas separate from the rest of the city. She recommends integrating projects into the urban fabric, which would strengthen not just the projects themselves, but also the immediately surrounding areas. Integration diminishes the problem of border vacuums and neighborhood isolation, while simultaneously promoting economic and social growth.

The principles for reintegrating projects are the same as those promoting vitality in other urban neighborhoods. Planners must first determine what conditions for generating diversity are lacking, such as the absence of mixed uses, long blocks, homogeneity of building age and type, and low population density. The second step is fostering diversity-generating conditions.

Projects present particular obstacles to reintegration. Like any slum, they require unslumming. Projects must be desirable enough to retain their dwellers by choice. They must be safe and practical for everyday life. They need casual public figures, natural supervision for children, well-surveilled and continuously used public spaces, and normal cross-use. All the elements that make up a successful city must be present in projects for integration to occur. This difficult task includes creating new streets that lead to new uses and providing visually distinctive structures to create order. Physical and economic improvements are key to salvaging projects, as is fostering safety.

This chapter focuses on the civic apparatus tasked with creating and implementing urban policies. It addresses the shortcomings of this apparatus and suggests improvements.

As cities grow in size and complexity, the responsibilities of civic authorities increase. These responsibilities include housing, welfare, education, health, and regulatory planning. In general, administrative changes have not kept pace with the increasing size and complexity of cities. As a result, overburdened administrators have implemented simplistic solutions to complex problems. The system has lost the power to understand and value varied, unique, complex, and interlocked details.

Planning for a vibrant city demands stimulating and catalyzing a wide range and quantity of diversity of uses and users. Mixed uses and users must also be distributed through each part of the city to create the foundation for economic strength, as well as social vitality and magnetism. Civic authorities are often ineffective at solving urban problems, not because they are necessarily incompetent, but simply because the task is monumental.

Many planners believe that creating larger districts can ease administrative problems, but Jacobs argues it will simply exacerbate them. Cities are generally run like small towns, only adapted for more people. As Jacobs observes, this approach is doomed to fail because big cities “pose operational problems that are innately different from those posed by little cities” (410). Vertical and horizontal divisions, both functional and territorial, characterize civic administrations across the country, with each division operating according to its own rationale. Administrations are fragmented. Put together, the various divisions create nothing but chaos.

Many American cities addressed the issue of fragmentation by establishing planning commissions, but these groups simply replicated or reinforced the problems they were supposed to solve. Instead of effective instruments for understanding and coordinating complex cities, planning commissions became destructive instruments of unbuilding, staffed by workers who “do not and cannot know enough about places within cities to do anything else, try as they might” (417). Planning commissions tend to promote ideas that look good on paper, but that fail in real life.

Jacobs argues city services, such as health, housing, and education should be localized. No amount of expertise can replace what she refers to as “locality knowledge in planning” (418). She argues for a decentralization of city governance and its reorganization into a horizontal municipal administration. Last, she seeks to do away with oversimplified city planning. In short, the civic apparatus should be more complex, but it should function more simply. 

The concluding chapter of Jacobs’s book addresses the nature of cities and the analytical tools best suited to understanding them. Innovative ways of thinking stemming from scientific fields opened new avenues for analysis and discovery. Jacobs discusses three stages of development in scientific thought: “(1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity” (429).

The first type of problem, the ability to deal with simple problems, contains only two factors (or variables) that relate directly to one another in their behavior. Advances in the sciences over the course of three centuries led to the second method, which emerged after 1900. The number of variables scientists could tackle grew exponentially, marking the shift from simple problems to problems of disorganized complexity, the second type of problem. Jacobs explains the shift by comparing the movement of a single ball on a billiard table to millions of balls. The second task is not more difficult theoretically, but the number of balls makes it impractical. The problem is deemed disorganized because the variables move in varied, unpredictable ways. Nevertheless, “the system as a whole possess certain orderly and analyzable average properties” (431).

The third type of problem, problems of organized complexity, emerged in 1932, when researchers applied techniques from the life sciences to the study of the social sciences. Advances multiplied because “the life sciences were recognized to be problems in organized complexity, and [were] attacked in ways suitable to understanding the kind of problem” (432).

Jacobs presents cities as problems of organized complexity. In cities, many variables are interconnected and can be analyzed using life sciences. Cities have many variables, but they are not disordered. Rather, they are “interrelated into an organic whole” (433). Urban theorists mistake cities for problems of simplicity and of disorganized complexity, and thus analyze them as such. These approaches, however, are not enabling or effective. New probability techniques and advances in statistics are powerful tools for studying cities, allowing researchers to make formerly disorganized complex problems (people’s incomes, spending money and housing) simple problems. (438)