Thirty years following its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Metropolitan areas was described by The New York Moments as “possibly the most important single work in the annals of town planning….[It] can also be seen in a much bigger context. It really is first of all a function of literature; the explanations of street existence as some sort of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be examine for pleasure actually by those that long ago soaked up and appropriated the book’s quarrels.” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on structures in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being demolished by powerful architects and city planners. Strenuous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs’s small masterpiece is normally a blueprint for the humanistic administration of cities. It really is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. The author has written a new foreword for this Modern Library edition.