**Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and keenly detailed, a monumental
work that provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of
all cities.
**
**The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of
this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright
honesty and common sense. --The New York Times
**
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.