Who knew that a guidebook for Cities:Skylines could be a powerful academic text that condemns the use of government power to destroy organically grown neighborhoods and communities?
Jacobs' book is almost 60 years old. It was written at the height of post-war suburban sprawl and at the beginning of the death of the American city.
Confession: When discussing this book on dates, I called it "Great Life and Death of American Cities" and "Life and Death of Great American Cities". I remember the unamused look of a girl saying, "Yes, Jane Jacobs" and only realized weeks afterwards that it was because I completely butchered the title. "What, babe, you haven't read the Stone of Philosophers and Harry Potter"?
Death comes first because the cities died. 10 years after Jane Jacobs published her book, property crimes doubled. White flight was at its maximum. Hollywood filled theaters with scenes of skeevy ally streets. My home, Washington, D.C, lost 25% of its district population decade after decade.
And then Life: a reversal, a growing, a resurgence of American cities that, as she warned, threatens to wipe them out. Everywhere one looks, the walkable, diverse American city grows in splendor as the suburban villages of yesterday wither. What makes the new American city Jacobsian? Economic diversity, dense walkable areas, and cross-use that mixes the new and old. What threatens the new American city? Rising prices kill profit margins kill economic diversity until the only things left are apartments for artless tech bros, tech companies, and the restaurants willing to deliver Ubereats.
There is a certain sense of pragmatic radicalism that comes through. "Let's build utopia!" is answered with a "Let's uhhh, not". This is lower-case c conservatism. The conservatism of _ecology_. Jacob's rightly sees The City in terms of a complex web of interdependent systems, like a rainforest or an industrial economy. "If it didn't work for the USSR, why do you think it would work for the Department of Urban Planning?" is something you almost expect to see on the page (except, of course, that the book was written 30 years before the fall of the USSR).
Reading this book, you feel like you are reading a piece of literature thrown into the past, like a time traveler writing a letter to the present, "This is what it will be like."
