Update:
  • the book is actually about how "planning theory" is dead wrong about everything and her examples of good neighborhoods are those that lacked planning and were bottom-up
  • Jacobs never went to college
  • Jacobs has lived in big cities and everyone of her arguments so far is supported by that kind of direct empiricism
  • I'm only a chapter in but she sounds like the Mises of Urban Planning
I suspect she'd argue that Detroit fell into a wasteland on top of losing most of its economic activity because it was excessively planned.