The Death and Life of Great American Cities

In September 2025, we discussed a classic urbanist book, Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. We considered what this book, written nearly 65 years ago, says that can guide cities like Atlanta today. We aren’t the only ones asking that question. In 2016, the New Yorker magazine looked back on Death and Life, what it got right, and what the writer says it got wrong. “The book,” Adam Gopnik writes, “is really a study in the miracle of self-organization,” and how you can see this miracle in cities . . . if you just look around.