Jane Jacobs and the Hull House

Jane Jacobs, the author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, though never finished college, wrote pieces focused on cities. She concentrated on how and why cities worked, as well as why urban renewal and redevelopment was hurting the great cities instead of improving them. She expresses arguments on the principles and aims of the orthodox city planning and rebuilding that have shaped modern cities (1). Her most pronounced arguments are the planners approach to redevelopment and revitalization, their way of viewing the city, their understanding of cities, and how they worked. In Chapter 22 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs refers back to the “slums” of North Boston (8). Previous to writing this book she had visited North Boston twenty years earlier. When she visited she noted the terrible living conditions, as well as physical conditions of the city (9). When she revisited in 1959, she came back to a whole different city. Living conditions had improved, small cramped houses, were now housing not as many people, and the physical conditions of these houses had also improved a great bit. During this time the government had been set out to go demolish the slums and rebuild to what they ought cities should be, how they ought to work, and what would be best for cities. Since the government had not touched North Boston it was still considered a slum, even though clearly a welcoming and friendly neighborhood had blossomed there. Even the statistics supported the well being of the city. Jacobs soon discovered that the residents of the city had pulled together their money to create this utopia of a city, even if the government did not view it as so. The planners assigned by the government were to go into slums and create a new city out of them. The problem with this plan was that they did not know the cities. Instead of taking time to study what North Boston had done with this city they took their own scientific research and applied it