---
title: "The Life and Death of Great American Cities"
type: Book
date: 2021-04-20
rating: 5
author: "Jane Jacobs"
genre:
year: 1961
status: Finished
tags:
image: the-life-and-death-of-great-american-cities.jpg
colorSortKey: [1, -112, 1]
---


I think I liked this book more as a cultural artifact than as an actual piece of reading material that I could usefully recommend to others. I say that coming from a place where I fundamentally agree with Jacobs; I think her arguments against modernism, while undoubtedly influential, are more concisely and persuasively evolved upon in [[Seeing Like A State]], and her proposals for a _better_ path forward are couched in anecdata. (And I want her to be right — I just wasn't particularly swayed by the same references to the same three neighborhoods!) 

Ultimately, her ethos is better represented as an antithesis than a thesis, and you can probably do without the sheer _size_ of the book. (Still, it is — and I feel guilty saying this — one of those books that I feel proud to have rea