Week 5: The Uses of City Neighborhoods

Contemporary urban sociology owes much to the legacy of Jane Jacobs, a staff writer at Architectural Forum and a community activist who helped change our views about architectural modernism and urban renewal policy in postwar America. She assaulted the misguided policies of slum clearance bureaucrats who devas- tated vital urban neighborhoods in favor of expressways and oppressively dull housing blocks surrounded by seas of indefensible open spaces. Dense networks of lively streets and sociologically diverse neighborhoods are important touchstones to the urban quality of life for Jacobs. She championed the cause of neighborhood preservation and helped save Greenwich Village from the bulldozers of New York power broker Robert Moses and his plan for an urban expressway through Lower Manhattan.

This chapter is excerpted from her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In this book, she also describes the lively daily ballet of life on Hudson Street where she lived, the significance of public characters, and the informal surveillance networks of “eyes on the street” that helped regulate public security for residents living among urban strangers. She celebrated the messiness and spontaneity of urban street life that was so full of serendipitous encounters. She sought to shift urban planners away from slum clearance toward a more enlightened policy that promoted rather than destroyed neighborhoods.