The Life and Death of Cities

Everyone dies, but everyone believes that his/her city never perishes. For thousands of years, if they are not destroyed by wars, natural disasters or other irresistible impact, cities live forever in people's minds; by accumulating materials and inheriting spirit, they are historical carriers that extend production and the lives of human beings. But, in contradistinction to people's wishes, a city is also an organism that has a cycle of life and death, though it lasts longer, is more complicated, transcends humans span of short life and, therefore, is more than they could envision.

A city is not just a physical space (even physical space can be eroded by time) that is filled with streets and buildings. Rather, it is intertwined with generations of lives, with politics, economy, culture and history, all of which are tumultuous and gloomy. The lives and deaths of cities have never been easy to define and have always been controversial. People invented the profession of Urban Planning in the hope that it would give a city a thorough career planning and save it from decline, which would eventually extend its life forever – only to find that, unfortunately, it has often been referred to as a city terminator. Some reckon that developers invest in order to build a city, while historical protectionists argue that, with the profit-before-everything-else mentality, they have eliminated a city's collective memory and suffocated any vitality a city originally had. Some believe that architects construct cities, while others criticise them for indulging themselves in their own dreams, treating cities as tabula rasa, and changing the design whenever they feel like it without any regard to city users’ life and death.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs published the famous The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Adopting the voice of an ordinary citizen, she strongly criticised the urban planning thinking represented by Ebenezer Howard's Garden City, Le Corbusier's Radiant City, and Daniel Burnham's City Beautiful. Reprimanded by Jacobs as pseudoscience, this kind of thinking was superficially tinged with a certain degree of idealism and was popular, for a while, in post-war America, before turning into the professional criteria and infallible principles of governmental planning officials, investment banks, developers and students. Under such a mindset, urban planning had ignored the practical need for various forms to co-exist and mingle in the city.