A diatribe against the “Radiant Garden City Beautiful” utopian, top-down planning that was popular in the 20th century, in her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs makes a compelling argument that cities fundamentally require variety to thrive. She extends this fundamental definition of city vitality to make compelling cases for why low-income housing projects so often fail, why some slums stay slums and others “unslum”, and even why San Francisco’s Civi...
