The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities revolutionized urban theory by shifting the focus towards human-scale, walkable urban design.

In celebration of Random House’s 100th anniversary, the publisher is reissuing this landmark publication as a hardcover edition featuring bold new cover art, a stunning paper-over-board design, and custom endpapers.

“This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”

In this seminal work by Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, she argues that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners.

Through exploring neighborhoods in cities across the country, Jacobs outlines her vision of how a city can best serve its citizens, including walkable streets, parks, a mix of new and old architecture, and the importance of diversity. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs’s tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable six decades later.