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The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, is arguably the most influential book written on urban planning in the 20th century. First published in 1961, the book is a scathing critique of modernist planning policies claimed by Jacobs to be destroying many existing inner-city communities.

Reserving her most vitriolic criticism for the "rationalist" planners (specifically Robert Moses) of the 1950s and 1960s, she argues that modernist urban planning rejects the city, because it rejects human beings living in a community characterized by layered complexity and seeming chaos. The modernist planners used deductive reasoning to find principles by which to plan cities. Among these policies the most violent was urban renewal; the most prevalent was and is the separation of uses (i.e. residential, industrial, commercial).

These policies, she claimed, destroy communities and innovative economies by creating isolated, unnatural urban spaces. In their place Jacob advocated a dense and mixed-use urban aesthetic that would preserve the uniqueness inherent in individual neighborhoods. Her aesthetic can be considered opposite to that of the modernists, upholding redundancy and vibrancy, against order and efficiency. She frequently cites New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community. This, like many similar communities, may well have been preserved, in part at least, on account of her writing and activism.

The book also played a major role in the urban development of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, where Jacobs was involved in the campaign to stop the Spadina Expressway. Toronto, where Jacobs lived from 1968 until her death, is to this day regarded as one of the few major metropolises in North America to have successfully maintained a large number of residential neighborhoods in its downtown core. This status is attributed in part to Jacobs' writing and her local community activism.

The book continues to be Jacobs' most influential, and is still widely read by both planning professionals and the general public. Urban theorist Lewis Mumford, while finding fault with her methodology, encouraged Jacobs' early writings,^[1] in the New York Review of Books. Robert Caro has cited Jacobs' book as the strongest influence on The Power Broker, his biography of Robert Moses.

Jacobs' writings were an important influence on New Urbanism, an architecture and planning movement which emerged in the 1980's.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities made the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's 50 Best Books of the Twentieth Century and was #39 on National Review's list of the 100 best non-fiction books of the century.

1. ^ Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001. Retrieved on 2006-04-23.

• [1961] (February 1993) The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Modern Library (hardcover), New York: Random House. ISBN 0-679-60047-7.  This edition includes a new foreword written by the author.