5411. Two Tales of a City
- Author:
- Ethan Wagner
- Publication Date:
- 03-2012
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Journal:
- Journal of International Affairs
- Institution:
- School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University
- Abstract:
- “As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning,” wrote Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities , her scholarly assault on the field of city planning. An iconoclast, Jacobs intended the volume as nothing less than an indictment of the prevailing urban orthodoxy. “Years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense,” she wrote. In painstaking detail, Jacobs refutes the titans of city planning whose ideas dominated her era: Daniel Burnham, Lewis Mumford, Le Corbusier and Robert Moses, among others. In time, she was hailed as a pioneer in urban thought and a champion of those who see cities as living communities, not mere lines on a map. Though the faceless high-rises she disdained still tower over many metropolises, her vision has become required reading for urban planners everywhere, and her ideas form the basis of some of the most successful efforts to revitalize life in the American city over the past twenty-five years.
- Political Geography:
- America