Summary of the introduction

In the introduction of the book Jane Jacobs is giving us an idea what she is going to elaborate about further in her book “The Death and life of the great American cities ” .She introduces a few major early twentieth century theories how the city should look like and how it should properly operate. For example the European architects plan ( better word to describe it would be DREAM) called “Radiant City”, where in the you would have a tall skyscraper in the middle of a beautiful, green park and surrounded by cultural centers. Another major theory described by Jacobs is the “Garden City” planning, where the plan was to build a suburb kind of towns with low density and a lot of parks and recreation places. She criticizes a lot the current or “modern” city planning theories as well as the orthodox ones. Also Jacobs mentions in the intro that nobody cares about the what people that occupy some certain neighborhood need, all “they” care is money.