The Garden City was conceived as a new master-planned form, a self-sufficient town removed from the noise and squalor of late 19th century London, ringed by agriculture green belts, with schools and housing surrounding a highly prescribed commercial center. In summarizing the development of contemporary city planning theory, she begins with the Garden City of Ebenezer Howard.
Branding the mainstream theory of cities as an "elaborately learned superstition" that had now penetrated the thinking of planners, bureaucrats, and bankers in equal measure, she briefly traces the origins of this "orthodox urbanism." Jacobs begins the work with the blunt statement that: "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding." She describes a trip to Boston's North End neighborhood in 1959, finding it friendly, safe, vibrant and healthy, and contrasting her experience against her conversations with elite planners and financiers in the area, who lament it as a "terrible slum" in need of renewal. She instead advocated for dense mixed-use development and walkable streets, with the "eyes on the street" of passers-by helping to maintain public order. She opposed large-scale urban renewal programs that affected entire neighborhoods and built freeways through inner cities. She argued that modernist urban planning overlooked and oversimplified the complexity of human lives in diverse communities. Jacobs was a critic of " rationalist" planners of the 1950s and 1960s, especially Robert Moses, as well as the earlier work of Le Corbusier. The book is Jacobs' best-known and most influential work. The book is a critique of 1950s urban planning policy, which it holds responsible for the decline of many city neighborhoods in the United States. The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a 1961 book by writer and activist Jane Jacobs.
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