Great Streets

"Jacobs has been working on this classic -- there's no other word for it -- for a decade. Jacobs rightly believes that good cities are made of good streets and that we're rapidly losing our talent for creating them. He measures and draws many of the worldUs great streets, from Pittsburgh to Beijing. He describes changes in the street pattern of cities like Boston, where a square mile of downtown contains 100 fewer blocks than it did a century ago. . . .