The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Jane Jacobs • Vintage Books

ISBN-10: 067974195X · ISBN-13: 978‑0679741954 · 1992

Live offer for this book: 105 live copies of this book from $5.04 (as of 2026-09-09).

Dimensions: 8 × 5.2 × 1 in

Canonical book record

Completeness 64

Cover quality: low resolution

2manybooks editorial

A direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured. In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.

Book metadata

Marketplace observations

105 live copies of this book from $5.04 (as of 2026-09-09).

Contributors

Community tags

Inferred themes

Machine-inferred from catalog text. Not verified subjects.

Community signals

Have: 9 · Like: 4 · Rating: 3.8 / 5 (14)