Great American Cities Book Report

The Death and Life of Great American Cities written by Jane Jacobs published in 1961, is the most influential book about city planning. Jane wrote this book criticizing the modern city planning and rebuilding which she calls the orthodox city planning idea. Ebenezer howard’s self sufficient small town Garden city, Le-Corbusier’s Radiant City composed of skyscrapers and the Decentrists’ city decentralizing ideas are the victim of her criticism. In the book, she effectively describes the problems that orthodox city planning ideas create and how they make a city unlivable by making it dull and dangerous. To prove her opposition, she provides plenty of examples by observing the cities and the neighborhoods. Jacobs also briefly explains and …show more content…
Uniformity is the piece that Jacobs hates the most about garden city because it is the direct opposite of her ideas of diversity. Jacobs called the garden city a nonsense and feudal idea because she wrote, according to Howard’s view industrial upper class should stay clean in their class and the working agricultural class should continue with agriculture. To me, it sounds like the Ancient Egyptian social structure where the upper class always stays on top and the peasants always stay at the bottom. Old days are expired. In the new day's world, everyone deserves opportunities no matter what the class is. Furthermore, she had her attack on the garden city ideas and criticized it because, “a silly substance” like the garden city which is controlled and owned by the authority, which thins out the city and separates the communities was getting acceptance and was actually being built in the UK and even in the U.S. By separating the cities and pre-arranging the needs of the city, Howard utilized a paternalistic authority over the