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Review
"Jacobs has been working on this classic there"s no other word for it for a decade. Jacobs rightly believes that good cities are made of good streets and that we"re rapidly losing our talent for creating them. He measures and draws many of the worldi' s great streets, from Pittsburgh to Beijing. He describes changes in the street pattern of cities like Boston, where a square mile of downtown contains 100 fewer blocks than it did a century ago... A thoughtful, sane, informed and very personal book, aimed primarily at professionals but readable enough for anyone interested in the subject." Robert Campbell , Boston Globe
Product Description
Which are the world's best streets, and what are the physical, designable characteristics that make them great? To answer these questions, Allan Jacobs has surveyed street users and design professionals and has studied a wide array of street types and urban spaces around the world. With more than 200 illustrations, all prepared by the author, along with analysis and statistics, Great Streets offers a wealth of information on street dimensions, plans, sections, and patterns of use, all systematically compared. It also reveals Jacobs's eye for the telling human and social details that bring streets and communities to life.An extensive introduction discusses the importance of streets in creating communities and criteria for identifying the best streets. The essays that follow examine 15 particularly fine streets, ranging from medieval streets in Rome and Copenhagen to Venice's Grand Canal, from Parisian boulevards to tree-lined residential streets in American cities. Jacobs also looks at several streets that were once very fine but are less successful today, such as Market Street in San Francisco, identifying the factors that figure in their decline.To broaden his coverage, Jacobs adds briefer treatments of more than 30 other streets arranged by street type, including streets from Australia, Japan, and classical antiquity in addition to European and North American examples. For each of these streets he has prepared plans, sections, and maps, all drawn at the same scales to facilitate comparisons, along with perspective views and drawings of significant design details.Another remarkable feature of this book is a set of 50 one square-mile maps, each reproduced at the same scale, of the street plans of representative cities around the world. These reveal much about the texture of the cities' street patterns and hence of their urban life. Jacobs's analysis of the maps adds much original data derived from them, including changes of street patterns over time.Jacobs concludes by summarizing the practical design qualities and strategies that have contributed most to the making of great streets.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Very good book for urban design, planning and architecture. Especially good block analysis of around 100 urban areas across world concluding that smaller blocks are generally better for public life - contrary to the trend of modern development and planning. Takes architects from a view of the specific building statement to the streetscape experience as of over-riding importance. Valuable reference for my PhD thesis on urban design...
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
8 reviews
18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Walking in Thought
30 Dec 2003
Format:Paperback
This wonderful book consideres the civic street from many perspecitives and describes it with poetic attention. The author has spent days on these great streets and brings careful measurement and observation to his carefully crafted text. If everyone planning streets and highways in America read this book and visited one of two of these great streets, it would enable a huge improvement.
This book studies the street not from the simple American perspecitve of high velocity traffic sewar, but from the realities of a place to hang out. eat lunch, shop, socialize, people watch, court, celebrate and be. The read how these places work in this book is to realize how much our desperate focus on the automobile costs us.
Buy this book and photocopy some of its illustrations for your next public hearing on town planning.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Wonderful book!
19 Feb 2009
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I was really very impressed with this book! It's an exceptional insight into what really makes for a pleasant, people-friendly street! I loved it so much, when I finished it, I immediately went back to the beginning and read it all over again! Really, really very good work! You will very much enjoy it if you love planning, architecture, landscape design, or just livable, beautiful neighborhoods!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Great!
26 Feb 2010
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I love this book! The drawings are amazing and they really help backup what the author is saying, regarding density and proportion of streets.
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