# The Death and Life of Great American Cities  ## Metadata - Author: [[Jane Jacobs]] - Full Title: The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Category: #books ## Highlights - and discusses, finally, the kind of problem which cities pose—a problem in handling organized complexity. ([Location 290](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=290)) - There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. ([Location 303](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=303)) - But sidewalks and those who use them are not passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger. Sidewalks, their bordering uses, and their users, are active participants in the drama of civilization versus barbarism in cities. To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks. ([Location 492](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=492)) - To build city districts that are custom made for easy crime is idiotic. Yet that is what we do. ([Location 523](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=523)) - A network of doormen and superintendents, of delivery boys and nursemaids, a form of hired neighborhood, keeps residential Park Avenue supplied with eyes. ([Location 664](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=664)) - The greater and more plentiful the range of all legitimate interests (in the strictly legal sense) that city streets and their enterprises can satisfy, the better for the streets and for the safety and civilization of the city. ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=687)) - But there is nothing simple about that order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go into it. Most of those components are specialized in one way or another. They unite in their joint effect upon the sidewalk, which is not specialized in the least. That is its strength. ([Location 908](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=908)) - The sum of such casual, public contact at a local level—most of it fortuitous, most of it associated with errands, all of it metered by the person concerned and not thrust upon him by anyone—is a feeling for the public identity of people, a web of public respect and trust, and a resource in time of personal or neighborhood need. The absence of this trust is a disaster to a city street. Its cultivation cannot be institutionalized. And above all, it implies no private commitments. ([Location 935](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=935)) - This ideal is that if anything is shared among people, much should be shared. “Togetherness,” apparently a spiritual resource of the new suburbs, works destructively in cities. The requirement that much shall be shared drives city people apart. ([Location 1036](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1036)) - Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life may grow. ([Location 1207](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1207)) - Sidewalk width is invariably sacrificed for vehicular width, partly because city sidewalks are conventionally considered to be purely space for pedestrian travel and access to buildings, and go unrecognized and unrespected as the uniquely vital and irreplaceable organs of city safety, public life and child rearing that they are. ([Location 1444](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1444)) - The whole idea of doing away with city streets, insofar as that is possible, and downgrading and minimizing their social and their economic part in city life is the most mischievous and destructive idea in orthodox city planning. ([Location 1456](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1456)) - Conventionally, neighborhood parks or parklike open spaces are considered boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities. Let us turn this thought around, and consider city parks deprived places that need the boon of life and appreciation conferred on them. ([Location 1469](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1469)) - Too much is expected of city parks. Far from transforming any essential quality in their surroundings, far from automatically uplifting their neighborhoods, neighborhood parks themselves are directly and drastically affected by the way the neighborhood acts upon them. ([Location 1565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1565)) - In cities, liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life. ([Location 1625](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=1625)) - If a city area has only new buildings, the enterprises that can exist there are automatically limited to those that can support the high costs of new construction. ([Location 3056](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=3056)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Unfortunately, however, densities high enough to bring with them innate city problems are not by any means necessarily high enough to do their share in producing city liveliness, safety, convenience and interest. And so, between the point where semisuburban character and function are lost, and the point at which lively diversity and public life can arise, lies a range of big-city densities that I shall call “in-between” densities. They are fit neither for suburban life nor for city life. They are fit, generally, for nothing but trouble. ([Location 3424](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=3424)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos. ([Location 3663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=3663)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Genuine architectural variety, Raskin pointed out, does not consist in using different colors or textures. ([Location 3678](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=3678)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In architecture as in literature and the drama, it is the richness of human variation that gives vitality and color to the human setting… ([Location 3747](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=3747)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. Since the strange leads to questions and undermines familiar tradition, it serves to elevate reason to ultimate significance…There is no better proof of this fact than the attempts of all totalitarian authorities to keep the strange from their subjects…The big city is sliced into pieces, each of which is observed, purged and equalized. The mystery of the strange and the critical rationality of men are both removed from the city. ([Location 3901](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=3901)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Diversity is crowded out by the duplication of success. Unless they are handsomely financed to start with, or instantly successful (which is seldom the case), new ideas tumble into second-best locations; thereby second-best becomes first-rate, flourishes for a time, and eventually it too is destroyed by the duplication of its own greatest successes. ([Location 4027](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=4027)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The key link in a perpetual slum is that too many people move out of it too fast—and in the meantime dream of getting out. ([Location 4419](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=4419)) - The foundation for unslumming is a slum lively enough to be able to enjoy city public life and sidewalk safety. ([Location 4544](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=4544)) - It is so easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic…or immigrants…or the whimsies of the middle class. The decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated. It goes right down to what we think we want, and to our ignorance about how cities work. ([Location 5158](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=5158)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The administrative structure itself is at fault because it has been adapted beyond the point that mere adaptations can serve. This is how human affairs often evolve. There comes a point, at increased levels of complication, when actual invention is required. ([Location 6748](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6748)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Cities have made one considerable attempt at invention to deal with this problem of fragmented administration—the invention of the planning commission. ([Location 6751](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6751)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Under this arrangement, it still remains that nobody, including the planning commission, is capable of comprehending places within the city other than in either generalized or fragmented fashion. ([Location 6759](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6759)) - Tags: [[blue]] - City administration needs to be more complex in its fundamental structure so it can work more simply. The present structures, paradoxically, are fundamentally too simple. ([Location 6841](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6841)) - Tags: [[blue]] - If great cities can learn to administer, coordinate and plan in terms of administrative districts at understandable scale, we may become competent, as a society, to deal too with those crazy quilts of government and administration in the greater metropolitan areas. ([Location 6949](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6949)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Which avenues of thinking are apt to be useful and to help yield the truth depends not on how we might prefer to think about a subject, but rather on the inherent nature of the subject itself. ([Location 6981](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6981)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Dr. Weaver lists three stages of development in the history of scientific thought: (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity; (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity; and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity. ([Location 6992](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6992)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Problems of simplicity are problems that contain two factors which are directly related to each other in their behavior—two variables—and these problems of simplicity, Dr. Weaver points out, were the first kinds of problems that science learned to attack: ([Location 6994](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6994)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Speaking roughly, one may say that the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries formed the period in which physical science learned how to analyze two-variable problems. ([Location 6996](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=6996)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Some imaginative minds [Dr. Weaver continues] rather than studying problems which involved two variables or at most three or four, went to the other extreme, and said, “Let us develop analytical methods which can deal with two billion variables.” That is to say, the physical scientists (with the mathematicians often in the vanguard) developed powerful techniques of probability theory and of statistical mechanics which can deal with what we may call problems of disorganized complexity… ([Location 7008](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7008)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Imagine, however, a large billiard table with millions of balls flying about on its surface…The great surprise is that the problem now becomes easier: the methods of statistical mechanics are now applicable. One cannot trace the detailed history of one special ball, to be sure; but there can be answered with useful precision such important questions as: On the average how many balls per second hit a given stretch of rail? On the average how far does a ball move before it is hit by some other ball?… ([Location 7017](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7017)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The whole structure of modern physics…rests on these statistical concepts. Indeed, the whole question of evidence, and the way in which knowledge can be inferred from evidence, is now recognized to depend on these same ideas…We have also come to realize that communication theory and information theory are similarly based upon statistical ideas. One is thus bound to say that probability notions are essential to any theory of knowledge itself. ([Location 7028](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7028)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Much more important than the mere number of variables is the fact that these variables are all interrelated…These problems, as contrasted with the disorganized situations with which statistics can cope, show the essential feature of organization. We will therefore refer to this group of problems as those of organized complexity. ([Location 7041](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7041)) - Tags: [[blue]] - All these are certainly complex problems. But they are not problems of disorganized complexity, to which statistical methods hold the key. They are all problems which involve dealing simultaneously with a sizable number of factors which are interrelated into an organic whole. ([Location 7046](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7046)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Cities happen to be problems in organized complexity, like the life sciences. They present “situations in which a half-dozen or even several dozen quantities are all varying simultaneously and in subtly interconnected ways.” ([Location 7060](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7060)) - Tags: [[blue]] - No matter what you try to do to it, a city park behaves like a problem in organized complexity, and that is what it is. The same is true of all other parts or features of cities. Although the interrelations of their many factors are complex, there is nothing accidental or irrational about the ways in which these factors affect each other. ([Location 7076](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7076)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Why have cities not, long since, been identified, understood and treated as problems of organized complexity? If the people concerned with the life sciences were able to identify their difficult problems as problems of organized complexity, why have people professionally concerned with cities not identified the kind of problem they had? ([Location 7088](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7088)) - Tags: [[blue]] - But in spite of this fact, planning theory has persistently applied this two-variable system of thinking and analyzing to big cities; and to this day city planners and housers believe they hold a precious nugget of truth about the kind of problem to be dealt with when they attempt to shape or reshape big-city neighborhoods into versions of two-variable systems, with ratios of one thing (as open space) depending directly and simply upon an immediate ratio of something else (as population).*1 ([Location 7107](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7107)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Beginning in the late 1920’s in Europe, and in the 1930’s here, city planning theory began to assimilate the newer ideas on probability theory developed by physical science. Planners began to imitate and apply these analyses precisely as if cities were problems in disorganized complexity, understandable purely by statistical analysis, predictable by the application of probability mathematics, manageable by conversion into groups of averages. ([Location 7115](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7115)) - Tags: [[blue]] - By carrying to logical conclusions the thesis that the city, as it exists, is a problem in disorganized complexity, housers and planners reached—apparently with straight faces—the idea that almost any specific malfunctioning could be corrected by opening and filling a new file drawer. ([Location 7136](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7136)) - Tags: [[blue]] - With these techniques, it was possible not only to conceive of people, their incomes, their spending money and their housing as fundamentally problems in disorganized complexity, susceptible to conversion into problems of simplicity once ranges and averages were worked out, but also to conceive of city traffic, industry, parks, and even cultural facilities as components of disorganized complexity, convertible into problems of simplicity. ([Location 7146](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7146)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the life sciences, organized complexity is handled by identifying a specific factor or quantity—say an enzyme—and then painstakingly learning its intricate relationships and interconnections with other factors or quantities. All this is observed in terms of the behavior (not mere presence) of other specific (not generalized) factors or quantities. ([Location 7177](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7177)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In the case of understanding cities, I think the most important habits of thought are these: 1. To think about processes; 2. To work inductively, reasoning from particulars to the general, rather than the reverse; 3. To seek for “unaverage” clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more “average” quantities are operating. ([Location 7182](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7182)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Why reason inductively? Because to reason, instead, from generalizations ultimately drives us into absurdities—as in the case of the Boston planner who knew (against all the real-life evidence he had) that the North End had to be a slum because the generalizations that make him an expert say it is. ([Location 7197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7197)) - Tags: [[blue]] - City processes in real life are too complex to be routine, too particularized for application as abstractions. They are always made up of interactions among unique combinations of particulars, and there is no substitute for knowing the particulars. ([Location 7203](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7203)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Underlying the city planners’ deep disrespect for their subject matter, underlying the jejune belief in the “dark and foreboding” irrationality or chaos of cities, lies a long-established misconception about the relationship of cities—and indeed of men—with the rest of nature. ([Location 7242](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7242)) - Tags: [[blue]] - The cities of human beings are as natural, being a product of one form of nature, as are the colonies of prairie dogs or the beds of oysters. ([Location 7245](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7245)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Nature watching, he points out, “is quite as easy in the city as in the country; all one has to do is accept Man as a part of Nature. Remember that as a specimen of Homo sapiens you are far and away most likely to find that species an effective guide to deeper understanding of natural history.” ([Location 7248](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7248)) - Tags: [[blue]] - In real life, barbarians (and peasants) are the least free of men—bound by tradition, ridden by caste, fettered by superstitions, riddled by suspicion and foreboding of whatever is strange. “City air makes free,” was the medieval saying, when city air literally did make free the runaway serf. ([Location 7256](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7256)) - Tags: [[blue]] - It is neither love for nature nor respect for nature that leads to this schizophrenic attitude. Instead, it is a sentimental desire to toy, rather patronizingly, with some insipid, standardized, suburbanized shadow of nature—apparently in sheer disbelief that we and our cities, just by virtue of being, are a legitimate part of nature too, and involved with it in much deeper and more inescapable ways than grass trimming, sunbathing, and contemplative uplift. ([Location 7267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7267)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Who would prefer this vapid suburbanization to timeless wonders? What kind of park supervisor would permit such vandalism of nature? An all too familiar kind of mind is obviously at work here: a mind seeing only disorder where a most intricate and unique order exists; the same kind of mind that sees only disorder in the life of city streets, and itches to erase it, standardize it, sub-urbanize it. ([Location 7298](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7298)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Big cities and countrysides can get along well together. Big cities need real countryside close by. And countryside—from man’s point of view—needs big cities, with all their diverse opportunities and productivity, so human beings can be in a position to appreciate the rest of the natural world instead of to curse it. ([Location 7304](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7304)) - Tags: [[blue]] - Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves. ([Location 7318](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01HWKSBDI&location=7318)) - Tags: [[blue]]