Search Results

Advanced Search

1 to 15 of 20 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

Where are all the people?

Owen Hatherley: Jane Jacobs, 27 July 2017

Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs 
by Robert Kanigel.
Knopf, 512 pp., £34, September 2016, 978 0 307 96190 7
Show More
Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs 
edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring.
Random House, 544 pp., £16.99, October 2016, 978 0 399 58960 7
Show More
Show More
... interests of real estate and cash-poor councils were taken into consideration, and that reason is: Jane Jacobs says no. This injunction can be traced back to the epiphany Jacobs experienced as a freelance journalist in Philadelphia in the mid-1950s when she visited new housing estates and old ‘slums’ with the city ...

Walls, Fences, Grilles and Intercoms

Andrew Saint: Security and the City, 19 November 2009

Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the 21st-Century City 
by Anna Minton.
Penguin, 240 pp., £9.99, June 2009, 978 0 14 103391 4
Show More
Show More
... the American influences, no doubt because they wield so much power today. As long ago as 1961, Jane Jacobs in her Death and Life of Great American Cities presented the case for a free and open security system based on the mutual vigilance of the street. That was partly countered by Oscar Newman, whose Defensible Space of 1973 suggested design ...

The Aestheticising Vice

Paul Seabright: Systematic knowledge, 27 May 1999

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed 
by James C. Scott.
Yale, 464 pp., £25, May 1998, 0 300 07016 0
Show More
Show More
... disliked about existing cities was that they looked messy, regardless of how they worked. Indeed, Jane Jacobs famously argued many years ago that the most human and interesting neighbourhoods to live in tended to look messy precisely because of the way they functioned – with a great deal of local initiative and decentralised happenstance. Corbusier and ...

At the Train Station

Gillian Darley, 20 October 2016

... the world’ within wider urban design. For their part, civic activists and urban thinkers such as Jane Jacobs and Herbert Gans saw those ‘leftovers’ in strong social and economic terms. The oil crisis shook the ‘obsolescence paradigm’ of unlimited growth and consumption to the core; adaptive reuse and sustainability entered the ...

Capitalism’s Capital

Jackson Lears: The Man Who Built New York, 17 March 2016

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York 
by Robert Caro.
Bodley Head, 1246 pp., £35, July 2015, 978 1 84792 364 6
Show More
Show More
... of modernist grandiosity accelerated a swerve in urban planning towards the view articulated by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which promoted a new emphasis on protecting vital neighbourhoods and allowing for unpredictable social encounters in public spaces. This was a turn to a different modernism: the sort embodied ...

It’s a Knock-Out

Tom Nairn, 27 May 1993

The Spirit of the Age: An Account of Our Times 
by David Selbourne.
Sinclair-Stevenson, 388 pp., £20, February 1993, 1 85619 204 0
Show More
Show More
... to the more romantic (or anarchist) position deriving from thinkers like Jane Jacobs (Cities and the Wealth of Nations, 1985) and Roman Szporluk (Communism and Nationalism, 1988). The LRB of 25 February published this reviewer’s variation on the second theme as ‘Forward to the Past’. The point of this list is not ...

The Great Sorting

Ben Rogers: Urban Inequality, 26 April 2018

The New Urban Crisis: Gentrification, Housing Bubbles, Growing Inequality and What We Can Do about It 
by Richard Florida.
Oneworld, 352 pp., £20, September 2017, 978 1 78607 212 2
Show More
Show More
... The editorial line is anti-suburb, anti-car, pro-bike, pro-coffee, pro-affordable housing, pro-Jane Jacobs. Although Florida’s position hasn’t fundamentally altered, he has become worried that cities are increasingly implicated in inequality. It’s true that they are engines of invention, prosperity and opportunity, and that without them our ...

Summer Simmer

Tom Vanderbilt: Chicago heatwaves, 22 August 2002

Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago 
by Eric Klinenberg.
Chicago, 305 pp., £19.50, August 2002, 0 226 44321 3
Show More
Show More
... spaces, while North Lawndale residents lived in fear of leaving the house. It reinforces a point Jane Jacobs once made: streets matter. In the months following the heatwave, the story – deemed a ‘summer story’ – gradually faded from the news. People began to lose track of how many people had died, and in their minds the death toll fell. In the ...

Diary

Inigo Thomas: New York Megacity, 16 August 2007

... dead. These weren’t exceptional remarks: gloom was everywhere. At the beginning of the 1960s, Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford, America’s most famous writers on urban issues, sensed a crisis on the horizon, but they didn’t foresee just how badly things would turn out. Nor did Robert Moses, who had been in charge of city planning since the 1920s, and ...

An Even Deeper Bunker

Tom Vanderbilt: Secrets and spies, 7 March 2002

Body of Secrets: How America’s NSA and Britain’s GCHQ Eavesdrop on the World 
by James Bamford.
Century, 721 pp., £20, May 2001, 0 7126 7598 1
Show More
Total Surveillance: Investigating the Big Brother World of E-Spies, Eavesdroppers and CCTV 
by John Parker.
Piatkus, 330 pp., £10.99, September 2001, 0 7499 2226 5
Show More
Show More
... on a public street any more intrusive than a patrolman stationed on the corner? Urban safety, as Jane Jacobs showed, is based in part on there being eyes on the street – the surveillance inherent in everyday life. The real question in all of this is motive, not means: who’s doing the watching, and for what purpose? On another level, 11 September did ...

Bigness

Hal Foster: Rem Koolhaas, 29 November 2001

Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping 
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 800 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6047 6
Show More
Great Leap Forward 
by Rem Koolhaas et al.
Taschen, 720 pp., £30, December 2001, 3 8228 6048 4
Show More
Show More
... of the un-city’; Shopping extends this insight to the US, and traces a perverse line from Jane Jacobs to ‘Disney Space’, giving examples of the preservation of city centres producing a non-urban void, later given over to malling. A dialectical twist of this sort has also jumped up and bitten Koolhaas, and Shopping can be read as a tacit ...

What makes a waif?

Joanne O’Leary, 13 September 2018

The Long-Winded Lady: Tales from the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Maeve Brennan.
Stinging Fly, 215 pp., £10.99, January 2017, 978 1 906539 59 7
Show More
Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the ‘New Yorker’ 
by Angela Bourke.
Counterpoint, 360 pp., $16.95, February 2016, 978 1 61902 715 2
Show More
The Springs of Affection: Stories 
by Maeve Brennan.
Stinging Fly, 368 pp., £8.99, May 2016, 978 1 906539 54 2
Show More
Show More
... remain secret even with everybody looking at them.’ Her columns are vivid depictions of what Jane Jacobs called ‘the ballet of the city sidewalk’, but they also display a fascination with the forces that were making that life extinct. In ‘The Last Days of New York City’ (1955), she considers the ‘rumour’ that Robert Moses planned to run ...

Town-Cramming

Christopher Turner: Cities, 6 September 2001

Cities for a Small Country 
by Richard Rogers and Anne Power.
Faber, 310 pp., £14.99, November 2000, 0 571 20652 2
Show More
Urban Futures 21: A Global Agenda for 21st-Century Cities 
by Peter Hall and Ulrich Pfeiffer.
Spon, 384 pp., £19.99, July 2000, 0 415 24075 1
Show More
Show More
... tax’ on out-of-town sites. The theoretical origins of this urban renaissance are to be found in Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). When Rogers and Power write of a major shift in attitude in the 1960s, ‘against clearance and new building and in favour of inner-city renovation and the protection of traditional ...

Ready to Go Off

Jenny Turner, 18 February 2021

A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler 
by Lynell George.
Angel City, 176 pp., $30, November 2020, 978 1 62640 063 4
Show More
‘Kindred’, Fledgling’, Collected Stories’ 
by Octavia E. Butler, edited by Gerry Canavan and Nisi Shawl.
Library of America, 790 pp., $31.50, January 2021, 978 1 59853 675 1
Show More
Show More
... and Los Angelena, and first came to know of Butler as a local author, a public character in the Jane Jacobs sense, signing books at readings, seen around the place in the sidewalk ballet. ‘Don’t you need a car in LA?’ George asks of Butler – a committed pedestrian – in her book. ‘She will smash this canard … [on] each long walk she takes ...

In the Shadow of Silicon Valley

Rebecca Solnit: Losing San Francisco, 8 February 2024

... was for sale.In her urbanist manifesto The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs wrote about ‘eyes on the street’: about the way that pedestrian traffic, people moving around – or sitting around – in public, kept a place safe and more than safe: convivial, gregarious. I think of what has come to my city as ‘the ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences