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The Escape
The Two Dangerous Assumptions at the Heart of Optimization Culture
We know less than we think, and more is not always better.
RIGHT FROM THE START, Jane Jacobs goes on the offensive.
“This book is an attack on current city planning,” Jacobs wrote. “My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on the principles and aims that have shaped modern, orthodox city planning.”
So begins The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961 but still in print today. It’s the most famous — perhaps the only famous — book on city planning ever written, and it is a 400-page takedown of what Jacobs viewed as the dehumanizing trends in urban development that arose during the 1950s.
Jacobs was in favor of dense, walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods where people naturally comingled as they went about their day. She was against isolated suburbs, centralized commerce hubs, and other fads that she felt divided communities and cut people off from one another.
I stumbled on Jacobs’s Death and Life months ago while I was doing research for my own book. I was interested in learning how the design of communities — real and virtual — can encourage or discourage human interaction, and Jacobs…
