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In The Death and Life of Great American Cities durchleuchtet Jane Jacobs 1961 die fragwürdigen Methoden der Stadtplanung und Stadtsanierung in Amerika, der "New Yorker" nannte es das unkonventionellste und provozierendste Buch über Städtebau seit langem. Die deutsche Ausgabe wurde schnell auch im deutschsprachigem Raum zu einer viel gelesenen und diskutierten Lektüre. Sie ist jetzt wieder in einem Nachdruck zugänglich, mit einem Vorwort von Gerd Albers (1993), das nach der Aktualität dieser Streitschrift fragt.… (mehr)
rakerman: Both Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte apply a keen observational eye to street life in New York, drawing unexpected conclusions about the complex ways in which people interact.
Deserving of its reputation as one of the most important books ever written in the field of American City Planning. It is a fascinating book, and I will never look at cities the same after reading it.
Jane Jacobs does a remarkable job of breaking down an incredible complex topic, making easily digestible, providing examples of good and bad, and building off of the idea in order to introduce her next idea.
She is not a planner, or engineer, or academic. Just a concerned citizen, who has a really good eye for understanding the complex processes of cities, and how they function. She also has a pretty compelling way with words, I really enjoyed some of her prose at times, and her extended metaphors could really have a lot of teeth. ( )
In an age when architects and planners were spouting all kinds of brave-new-world nonsense (or mindlessly absorbing it, or even worse – building it), Jacobs burst onto the scene with an incredible dose of sanity mixed with common sense and wisdom, carefully observing the urban environment and drawing a host of remarkably sensible conclusions. For some reason we architects seem always at risk of believing our own nuttiest fantasies. Jacobs is a perennial corrective. ( )
The first half of this book is a phenomenal introduction to thinking about /how to live in a city./ On every page I was struck by an insight that codified what was the difference between cities I loved living in, and ones I didn't. Furthermore, the same analysis can be viewed as advice about how to choose a place to live, and what to do when you get there. As someone working on a big, unstructured move of my own in the next few months, this is particularly timely advice.
The second half is very clearly not meant for me; it talks about what to do with a city in order to avoid its death and promote its liveliness. While this is certainly an interesting topic, it's not one I have much agency over, nor do I plan to ever be in such a situation. After several chapters with low insight density, I decided to skim the remainder of the book, and I don't feel like I missed much.
Jacobs' argument rests on four pillars: 1) city streets are not just thoroughfares, they are where life in the city is /actively lived/ 2) a neighborhood must bring in diverse people for diverse reasons in order to make streets safe 3) blocks must be short in order to facilitate many paths through them 4) there is a critical mass of humans necessary for city life, and thus high density residences are a necessity
Amidst these points, Jacobs discusses how parks fail, raising children in urban environments, what's wrong with housing projects, the ruinous effects of borders on neighborhoods and districts, along with a bevy of other somewhat tangential points. I suspect if I were a city planner I would have found a lot more value in these sections, but, well, I'm not and so I didn't.
In terms of how this book actually changed my thoughts on choosing a place to live, the following insights were particularly influential to me:
* When choosing where to live, work top down. Select a city based on stereotypes about the people who live there, and then drill down from there. Don't begin with the question of "what do I like in a city" and find a place that optimizes that. * Life occurs in densely populated streets. Find a neighborhood that reflects this, and make an effort to spend your time outside. * Neighborhoods run by way of an implicit, unofficial local government of citizens who have the interests of the neighborhood at heart. Think small business owners, church leaders, home owners, postal workers, etc. Being such a public figure is not a particularly hard thing to do, and should be strived for if you're looking for a sense of belonging, because everybody knows these people. * Take responsibility for your neighborhood. Help people who look lost, even if they don't ask for it; keep an eye out for suspicious characters; let people know if they've missed the last bus; etc. * Avoid places with large amounts of concurrent growth; these places will lose their diversity and die sooner than later. * Old buildings gain economic value over time, in terms of the riskier ventures their low rent can afford. * Aim to live on the seam between two neighborhoods; the juxtaposition of the two cultures is what creates an interesting place to live.
I'd rate the first half of this book as one of the top five books I've ever read. Very strongly recommended. ( )
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"Until lately the best thing that I was able to think of in favor of civilization, apart from blind acceptance of the order of the universe, was that it made possible the artist, the poet, the philosopher, and the man of science. But I think that is not the greatest thing. Now I believe that the greatest thing is a matter that comes directly home to us all. When it is said that we are too much occupied with the means of living to live, I answer that the chief worth of civilization is just that is makes the means of living more complex; that it calls for great and combined intellectual efforts, instead of simple, uncoordinated ones, in order that the crowd may be fed and clothed and housed and moved from place to place. Because more complex and intense intellectual efforts mean a fuller and richer life. They mean more life. Life is an end in itself, and the only question as to whether it is worth living is whether you have enough of it.
"I will add but a word. We are all very near despair. The sheathing that floats us over its waves is compounded of hope, faith in the unexplainable worth and sure issue of effort, and the deep, sub-conscious content which comes from the exercise of our powers."
-Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Widmung
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To New York City where I came to seek my fortune and found it by finding Bob, Jimmy, Ned and Mary for whom this is written too
Erste Worte
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This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding. It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to the Sunday supplements and women's magazines.
Zitate
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"Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them. By old buildings I mean not museum-piece old buildings, not old buildings in an excellent state of rehabilitation — although these make fine ingredients — but also a good lot of plain, ordinary, low-value old buildings, including some rundown old buildings....
Even the enterprises that can support new construction in cities need old construction in their immediate vicinity. Otherwise they are part of a total attraction and total environment that is economically too limited — and therefore functionally too limited to be lively, interesting and convenient. Flourishing diversity anywhere in a city means the mingling of high-yield, middling-yield, low-yield and no-yield enterprises."
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planners in charge.
This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them.
the public peace . . . is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.
The preferences of Utopians, and of other compulsive managers of other people's leisure, for one kind of legal enterprise over others is worse than irrelevant for cities.
In orthodox city planning, neighborhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerated magical fetishes.
Now this is a pitiful kind of planning, which would blindly destroy a city's existing pools of use and automatically foster new problems of stagnation, as a thoughtless by-product to pushing through new dreams.
American downtowns . . . are being witlessly mudered, in good part by deliberate policies of sorting out leisure uses from work uses, under the misapprehension that this is orderly city planning.
Given enough federal funds and enough power, planners can easily destroy city primary mixtures faster than these can grow in unplanned districts, so that there is a net loss of basic primary mixture.
. . . the last thing we need is some paternalist weighing whether we are sufficiently noncontroversial to be admitted to subsidized quarters in a Utopian dream city.
Maximum efficiency, or anything approaching it, means standardization.
The development of modern city planning and housing reform has been emotionally based on a glum reluctance to accept city concentrations of people as desirable, and this negative emotion about city concentrations of people has helped deaden planning intellectually.
The restoration of a static society, ruled - in everything that mattered - by a new aristocracy of altruistic planning experts, may seem a vision remote from modern American slum clearing, slum shifting [clear-cutting existing slums with the result of formation of new slums to accommodate the displaced residents] and slum immuring [subsidized public-housing projects]. But the planning derived from these semifeudal objectives has never been reassessed.
And yet, notwithstanding all this promotion, and the immense data-collecting and legislative work behind it, so cumbersome is this form of city investment that it serves better, in many instances, to paralyze and to penalize the use of money rather than to stimulate and to reward it.
Endless suburban sprawl was made practical (and for many families was made actually mandatory) through the creation of something the United States lacked until the mid-1930's: a national mortgage market specifically calculated to encourage suburban home building.
The changes required or wrought by erosion always occur piecemeal — so much so that we can almost call them insidious.
It is disturbing to think than men who are young today, men who are being trained now for their careers, should accept on the grounds that they must be "modern" in their thinking, cenceptions about cities and traffic which are not only unworkable, but also to which nothing new of any significance has been added since their fathers were children.
Nineteenth-century Utopians, with their rejection of urbanized society, and with their inheritance of eighteeth-century romanticism about the nobility and simplicity of "natural" or primitive man, were much attracted to the idea of simple environments that were works of art by harmonious consensus. To get back to this condition has been one of the hopes incorporated in our tradition of Utopian reform.
The voters sensibly decline to federate into a system where bigness means local helplessness, ruthless, oversimplified planning, and administrative chaos — for that is just what municipal bigness means today.
Letzte Worte
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But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities durchleuchtet Jane Jacobs 1961 die fragwürdigen Methoden der Stadtplanung und Stadtsanierung in Amerika, der "New Yorker" nannte es das unkonventionellste und provozierendste Buch über Städtebau seit langem. Die deutsche Ausgabe wurde schnell auch im deutschsprachigem Raum zu einer viel gelesenen und diskutierten Lektüre. Sie ist jetzt wieder in einem Nachdruck zugänglich, mit einem Vorwort von Gerd Albers (1993), das nach der Aktualität dieser Streitschrift fragt.
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