Retrospective Review Essay: Neighborhood Life and Urban Environment
the physical urban environment buildings, sidewalks, streets, and parks. This reconsideration reviews the context of Cities, its central ideas, and its reception. The essay discusses the relationship of the work to urban sociology at the time of its writing and in the current situation. Jacobs's book emerges from the big city milieu of the 1950s: its politics, social life, and architecture. The effects of the Housing Acts of 1947 and 1954 had become apparent, as had those of the Interstate Highways Act of 1956. Large scale slum clearance had taken place, and working class housing had also been razed in some places. Numerous federally financed low income, multistoried apartment buildings had been erected. Urban renewal land was being used for upper middle class housing and for such institutional purposes as hospitals, universities, and cultural centers. Expressways of unprecedented dimensions were being constructed through the cities. Suburbs were growing rapidly, with residential environments of singlefamily detached houses, shopping centers, and other facilities tied to the technology of the automobile. Jacobs was highly aware of all these physical developments, but there were also major social developments underway which eluded her glance. The mass migration of blacks from the rural South to the cities went unnoted. The baby boom was in progress but not mentioned in the book. On the other hand, Jacobs anticipated one social development which was about to happen: the urban explosion of crime and fear. One British reviewer wrote that, when he saw chapter headings about safety, he expected a discussion of environmental accidents, and he was surprised to read about the prevention of violent crimes. It made him wonder about American society. Leading ideas of urban planners, architects, and reformers provide the intellectual context of the work. Ebenezer Howard's English "garden city" ideas imported by Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Elizabeth Bauer Wurster, and others, with their advocacy of greenbelts, low densities, and