Eyes on the Street

Eyes on the Street
Author: Robert Kanigel
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 514
Release: 2017-08-08
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0345803337

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.

Dark Age Ahead

Dark Age Ahead
Author: Jane Jacobs
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2007-12-18
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0307425452

In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs—renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities—pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference—from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth—Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.

Wrestling with Moses

Wrestling with Moses
Author: Anthony Flint
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Total Pages: 274
Release: 2011-02-08
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0812981367

The rivalry of Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, a struggle for the soul of a city, is one of the most dramatic and consequential in modern American history. To a young Jane Jacobs, Greenwich Village, with its winding cobblestone streets and diverse makeup, was everything a city neighborhood should be. But consummate power broker Robert Moses, the father of many of New York’s most monumental development projects, thought neighborhoods like Greenwich Village were badly in need of “urban renewal.” Standing up against government plans for the city, Jacobs marshaled popular support and political power against Moses, whether to block traffic through her beloved Washington Square Park or to prevent the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, an elevated superhighway that would have destroyed centuries-old streetscapes and displaced thousands of families. By confronting Moses and his vision, Jacobs forever changed the way Americans understood the city. Her story reminds us of the power we have as individuals to confront and defy reckless authority.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities

The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Author: Martin Fuller
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 98
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351353055

Despite having no formal training in urban planning, Jane Jacobs deftly explores the strengths and weaknesses of policy arguments put forward by American urban planners in the era after World War II. They believed that the efficient movement of cars was of more value in the development of US cities than the everyday lives of the people living there. By carefully examining their relevance in her 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs dismantles these arguments by highlighting their shortsightedness. She evaluates the information to hand and comes to a very different conclusion, that urban planners ruin great cities, because they don’t understand that it is a city’s social interaction that makes it great. Proposals and policies that are drawn from planning theory do not consider the social dynamics of city life. They are in thrall to futuristic fantasies of a modern way of living that bears no relation to reality, or to the desires of real people living in real spaces. Professionals lobby for separation and standardization, splitting commercial, residential, industrial, and cultural spaces. But a truly visionary approach to urban planning should incorporate spaces with mixed uses, together with short, walkable blocks, large concentrations of people, and a mix of new and old buildings. This creates true urban vitality.

The Folklore of the Freeway

The Folklore of the Freeway
Author: Eric Avila
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre: ARCHITECTURE
ISBN: 9780816680726

The works of Chicanas and other women of color--from the commemorative poetry of Patricia Preciado Martin and Lorna Dee Cervantes to the fiction of Helena Maria Viramontes to the underpass murals of Judy Baca--expose highway construction as not only a racist but also a sexist enterprise. In colorful paintings, East Los Angeles artists such as David Botello, Carlos Almaraz, and Frank Romero satirize, criticize, and aestheticize the structure of the freeway. Local artists paint murals on the concrete piers of a highway interchange in San Diego's Chicano Park. The Rondo Days Festival in St. Paul, Minnesota, and the Black Archives, History, and Research Foundation in the Overtown neighborhood of Miami preserve and celebrate the memories of historic African American communities lost to the freeway.Bringing such efforts to the fore in the story of the freeway revolt, The Folklore of the Freeway moves beyond a simplistic narrative of victimization.

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs
Author: Alice Sparberg Alexiou
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2006
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0813537924

"In this analysis of Jane Jacobs's ideas and work, Alice Sparberg Alexiou tells the story of a woman who without any formal training in planning became a prominent spokesperson for sensible urban change. Besides writing the seminal book about contemporary cities, Jacobs organized successful community battles in New York against powerful interests. Based on an array of interviews and primary source material, this book brings long-overdue attention to Jacobs's far-reaching influence as an original thinker and effective activist."--BOOK JACKET.

New York History

New York History
Author: New York State Historical Association
Publisher:
Total Pages: 496
Release: 2003
Genre: New York (State)
ISBN:

City in the Sky

City in the Sky
Author: James Glanz
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 444
Release: 2003-11-12
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 0805074287

Like David McCullough's "The Great Bridge, City in the Sky" is a riveting story of New York City itself, of architectural daring, human frailty, and a lost American icon.

Robert Moses and the Modern City

Robert Moses and the Modern City
Author: Hilary Ballon
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-08-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 0393732436

A fresh look at the greatest builder in the history of New York City and one of its most controversial figures. “We are rebuilding New York, not dispersing and abandoning it”: Robert Moses saw himself on a rescue mission to save the city from obsolescence, decentralization, and decline. His vast building program aimed to modernize urban infrastructure, expand the public realm with extensive recreational facilities, remove blight, and make the city more livable for the middle class. This book offers a fresh look at the physical transformation of New York during Moses’s nearly forty-year reign over city building from 1934 to 1968.It is hard to imagine that anyone will ever have the same impact on New York as did Robert Moses. In his various roles in city and state government, he reshaped the fabric of the city, and his legacy continues to touch the lives of all New Yorkers. Revered for most of his life, he is now one of the most controversial figures in the city’s history. Robert Moses and the Modern City is the first major publication devoted to him since Robert Caro’s damning 1974 biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.In these pages eight short essays by leading scholars of urban history provide a revised perspective; stunning new photographs offer the first visual record of Moses’s far-reaching building program as it stands today; and a comprehensive catalog of his works is illustrated with a wealth of archival records: photographs of buildings, neighborhoods, and landscapes, of parks, pools, and playgrounds, of demolished neighborhoods and replacement housing and urban renewal projects, of bridges and highways; renderings of rejected designs and controversial projects that were defeated; and views of spectacular models that have not been seen since Moses made them for promotional purposes.Robert Moses and the Modern City captures research undertaken in the last three decades and will stimulate a new round of debate.

What We See

What We See
Author: Stephen A. Goldsmith
Publisher: New Village Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2010-05-01
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 098155931X

Leading thinkers offer fresh insight into the workings of vibrant, ecological, equitable communities and their economies.