The Lessons Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander Still Have to Teach

Cities Alive: Jane Jacobs, Christopher Alexander, and the Roots of the New Urban Renaissance, by Michael Mehaffy, explores the work of Jane Jacobs and Christopher Alexander in critiquing "the root philosophical problems that created erroneous thinking in city building in the 20th Century, continuing to the present day," according to a review of the book by Robert Steuteville.

"Mehaffy compares and contrasts the ideas of Jacobs and Alexander, tracing the roots of their thinking and the problems they identified back to Plato and Aristotle, through the Enlightenment and Modernism and finally post-modernism," adds Steuteville to describe the book.

According to the review, Mehaffy suggests the models provided by Jacobs and Alexander as an antidote to the world's contemporary patterns of urbanization—especially in rapidly urbanizing countries around the world.

Michael Mehaffy is a regular contributor to Planetizen. See his work here.