The Death Of Urbanism

Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, af- fordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross' "five stages of grief" – from pro-sprawl 'denial', NIMBY 'anger', revisionist NewUrban, 'bargaining', 'depressed' starchitects, through to an optimistic manifesto of 'acceptance'.

Koolhaas pronounced urbanism dead in 1995. Since then, urban design has struggled to come to terms with this and other losses including environmental stability, af- fordable housing, design control, and urban amenity. This book explores urban design paradigms transitioning through a misappropriation of Kübler-Ross' "five stages of grief" – from pro-sprawl 'denial', NIMBY 'anger', revisionist NewUrban, 'bargaining', 'depressed' starchitects, through to an optimistic manifesto of 'acceptance'.

Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments." Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.

This volume begins with the premise that the deepest respect is shown through honest critique. One of the greatest problems in understanding the influence of the author on cities and planning is that she has for much of the past five decades been "Saint Jane, the housewife" who upended urban renewal and gave us back our cities. Over time, she has become a saintly stick figure, a font of simple wisdom for urban health that allows many to recite her ideas and few to understand their complexity. The author has been the victim of her own success. This book gives this important thinker the respect she deserves, reminding planning professionals of the full range and complexity of her ideas and offering thoughtful critiques on the unintended consequences of her ideas on cities and planning today. It also looks at the international relevance – or lack thereof – of her work, with essays on urbanism in Abu Dhabi, Argentina, China, the Netherlands, and elsewhere.

More than five decades have passed since Jane Jacobs wrote her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and since a front page headline in the New York Times read, "Cars Choking Cities as 'Urban Sprawl' Takes Over." Yet sprawl persists, and not by mistake. It happens for a reason. As an activist and a scholar, Benjamin Ross is uniquely placed to diagnose why this is so. Dead End traces how the ideal of a safe, green, orderly retreat where hardworking members of the middle class could raise their children away from the city mutated into the McMansion and strip mall-ridden suburbs of today. Ross finds that sprawl is much more than bad architecture and sloppy planning. Its roots are historical, sociological, and economic. He uses these insights to lay out a practical strategy for change, honed by his experience leading the largest grass-roots mass transit advocacy organization in the United States. The problems of smart growth, sustainability, transportation, and affordable housing, he argues, are intertwined and must be solved as a whole. The two keys to creating better places to live are expansion of rail transit and a more genuinely democratic oversight of land use. Dead End is, ultimately, about the places where we live our lives. Both an engaging history of suburbia and an invaluable guide for today's urbanist, it will serve as a primer for anyone interested in how Americans actually live.

"William H. Whyte's curiosity compelled him to question the status quo--whether helping to make Fortune Magazine essential reading for business leaders, warning of "groupthink" in his bestseller The Organization Man, or standing up for Jane Jacobs as she advocated for the vitality of city life and public space. This compelling biography sheds light on Whyte's bold way of thinking, ripe for rediscovery at a time when we are reshaping our communities into places of opportunity and empowerment for all citizens" -- Backcover.