Eyes On The Street

The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence is felt to this day. Jane Jacobs was a phenomenal woman who wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged in thousands of impassioned debates—all of which she won. Robert Kanigel's revelatory portrait of Jacobs, based on new sources and interviews, brings to life the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the mother who raised three children; the journalist who honed her skills at Architectural Forum and Fortune before writing her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and the activist who helped lead a successful protest against Robert Moses’s proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village.

Although rarely explored in academic literature, most inhabitants and visitors interact with an urban landscape on a day-to-day basis is on the street level. Storefronts, first floor apartments, and sidewalks are the most immediate and common experience of a city. These “plinths” are the ground floors that negotiate between inside and outside, the public and private spheres. The City at Eye Level qualitatively evaluates plinths by exploring specific examples from all over the world. Over twenty-five experts investigate the design, land use, and road and foot traffic in rigorously researched essays, case studies, and interviews. These pieces are supplemented by over two hundred beautiful color images and engage not only with issues in design, but also the concerns of urban communities. The editors have put together a comprehensive guide for anyone concerned with improving or building plinths, including planners, building owners, property and shop managers, designers, and architects.

Ordinary people are natural experts on safety in their own communities. The key to creating a city where people feel safe is to give citizens input into developing safer environments for themselves. This book offers a set of easy-to-follow guidelines - well illustrated with photos - that can be used to improve urban safety. It also includes success stories on the ways that ordinary people, working in partnership with local governments and agencies have taken the initiative to fight back against violent crime in public housing, transit, parks and open places, underground parking, schools, houses and neighbourhoods.

Timing, skill, and talent all play an important role increating a great photograph, but the most primaryelement, the photographer's eye, is perhaps the mostcrucial. In The Eyes of the City, Richard Sandlershowcases decades' worth of work, proving his eye forstreet life rivals any of his generation. From 1977 to just weeks before September 11, 2001,Richard regularly walked through the streets of Bostonand New York, making incisive and humorous picturesthat read the pulse of that time.After serendipitously being gifted a Leica camera in1977, Sandler shot in Boston for three productive years and then moved back home to photograph in an edgy,dangerous, colicky New York City. In the 1980s crime and crack were on the rise and theireffects were socially devastating. Times Square, Harlem,and the East Village were seeded with hard drugs, whilein Midtown Manhattan, and on Wall Street, the richflaunted their furs in unprecedented numbers, and "greedwas good." In the 1990s the city underwent drastic changes to lurein tourists and corporations, the result of which was rapidgentrification. Rents were raised and neighborhoods weresanitized, clearing them of both crime and character.Throughout these turbulent and creative years Sandlerpaced the streets with his native New Yorker's eye forcompassion, irony, and unvarnished fact. The results are presented in The Eyes of the City,many for the first time in print. Overtly, they capture acomplex time when beauty mixed with decay, yet belowthe picture surface, they hint at unrecognized ghosts inthe American psyche.

A new book by influential urbanist Jane Jacobs, released in Jacobs' centenary, and showing her evolution as a writer and thinker. Vital Little Plans will bring together for the first time a selection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs. These works shed light on the development of the ideas she made famous in her best-known works, The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities, while expanding upon familiar themes with new insights. Some works also explore topics rarely directly addressed in her major works, from skyscrapers to feminism to universal health care to gentrification. Readers will find classics like her breakout article "Downtown Is for People" and a host of previously unpublished or obscure articles, speeches, and lectures that follow her entire career, from her early journalistic investigations into the specialty industries of New York City and the neighbourhoods that harboured them, to her critiques of the urban renewal regime, to her iconoclastic takes on economics, separatism, regulation, and the environment. Most importantly, it will reveal Jacobs as she herself wished to be understood: as a writer who tried to observe human life as closely as she could. The book showcases the rhythm of Jacobs' career. "A City Naturalist" collects articles from her early years in New York, where she honed her distinctive style and her interest in the commercial and everyday life of cities. "City Building" critiques contemporary architecture, city planning and urban renewal. In "How New Work Begins," she explores the economic foundations of flourishing city life, and the environmental and political implications of city growth. "The Ecology of Cities" weaves ethics, government regulation and social justice into her system of thought, and gives her integrated approach a name: "the ecology of cities." In "The Unfinished Business of Jane Jacobs," she revisits ideas from throughout her career in the context of current challenges, and turns her gaze to the uncertain future of human life.

Unsparing and important. . . . An informative, clearheaded and sobering book.—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post (1999 Critic's Choice) Inner-city black America is often stereotyped as a place of random violence, but in fact, violence in the inner city is regulated through an informal but well-known code of the street. This unwritten set of rules—based largely on an individual's ability to command respect—is a powerful and pervasive form of etiquette, governing the way in which people learn to negotiate public spaces. Elijah Anderson's incisive book delineates the code and examines it as a response to the lack of jobs that pay a living wage, to the stigma of race, to rampant drug use, to alienation and lack of hope.

Designed to inspire self-discovery, "There's a Hole in My Sidewalk" contains more than 100 touching poems that gently guide readers to a more authentic and fulfilling life.