I am a slow reader and I am currently ambling through The Death and Life of Great American Cities. As a city-dweller, I had already gained a fairly decent understanding of Jane Jacobs’s principles through citations in other books and by living in a city where she had such a lasting impact. I even work out of a building in Toronto that has a giant mural dedicated to Jacobs, a little old lady holding an ear horn to her ear—the physical form she took in her Toronto years.
However, I am ashamed to admit I had never actually read any of her writing until picking up this book. And while I am not done yet, I think I have picked up a few things worth mentioning.
For a text that had the arresting power to thwart the destruction of neighbourhoods—one that affected the literal ground beneath my feet—it’s more charming, funny, and human than I could have thought possible. And yet, that simple humanity is very much the point.
Jacobs walks us through New York and other North American cities from her own eyes, seemingly anecdotally. She insists we gather up the city as it is, rather than thrusting our own theories and apparatuses on top of it. There is real power to simply being human and alive in a place, an ability for humans to solve difficult urban problems on their own when the city's physical or psychic limitations don’t stand in our way. The observations she makes at street level might seem at first like the reports of small, highly personal events, but they resonate with her thesis that we need to spend more time engaging with actual human habits that are thriving in a place, versus the grandiose utopian principles we think ought to be there.
The impact of this thesis has affected countless lives. But on a smaller, more masturbatory level as poets, we build sidewalks and infrastructure for sound. And while it’s ultimately an act that we shape, we should be mindful of how much force we wield in the process, or perhaps we will create slums of meaning.
Also, if you’re still reading, this book pairs wonderfully with the album Left To Right by pianist Bill Evans. Evans, who played on Kind Of Blue as well as helming the legendary Bill Evans trio, plays a Steinway on his left hand and a Fender Rhodes on the right. Together, it creates a tension of wood and electric, tradition and technology, human and machine. It’s the dichotomy of urbanism present in Jacobs, made sonic. I love this album, and really like reading books while listening to it—especially in a city that can be a little noisy.
— Jaime Sugiyama (he/him) is a fourth-generation Canadian writer of Japanese and Italian descent. His essays and poetry have been published in the Globe and Mail, The Malahat Review, and Homework, and tend to focus on the animals, plants, and fungi that live in and around our cities and suburbs.
You can read Jaime Sugiyama's poetry in Issue 307 (Spring 2026). Order the issue now!
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