the death and life of great american cities book review

Quite often, however, I find myself considering Death and Life not as a book about cities, but as a book about books. And when she derides, for instance, 'the extraordinary governmental financial incentives have been required to achieve this degree of monotony, sterility, and vulgarity', you think straight away of a dozen recent cases where the words hit just as hard. This able woman had used her eyes, and, even more admirably, her heart.' Today, urbanists argue about 'what she really meant', as if the book were an ambiguous holy codex, but most of Jacobs's prescriptions remain clear and relevant.

As Lewis Mumford, one of Jacobs's opponents, wrote at the time: 'Here was a new kind of 'expert', very refreshing in current planning circles, where minds unduly fascinated by computers carefully confine themselves to asking only the kind of question that computers can answer and are completely negligent of the human contents or the human results. For a rigorous and polemical manual of urban planning, it achieved a remarkably wide readership, perhaps because it's such a rare joy to read a book about cities written by someone who actually seems to appreciate what makes them fun to live in. Her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is now 50 years old.

Those local campaigners were led by Jane Jacobs, another great Greenwich Village writer. For decades, Moses really did play god with New York, and for anyone who ever lived within his kingdom, 'I Bought a Little City', which was first published in the New Yorker, might not have seemed so absurd after all. But Barthelme first arrived in Greenwich Village, where he would live for most of the rest of his life, in the winter of 1962, just as local campaigners were narrowly defeating an attempt by the despotic city planner Robert Moses to run a 10-lane elevated highway through the middle of Washington Square Park.

As with much of Barthelme's work, the premise seems so absurd that one can't help but shake it until a metaphor falls out, and here one might well assume that, in the words of the novelist Donald Antrim, 'I Bought a Little City' is 'a take on the role that a writer has in writing a story – playing god, in a certain way'. I n Donald Barthelme's 1974 short story 'I Bought a Little City', the narrator decides one day to purchase Galveston, Texas, where he then tears down some houses, shoots 6,000 dogs, and rearranges what remains into the shape of a giant Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle visible only from the air.

The death and life of great american cities book review