Abstract
Jacobs stuck an audacious thumb in the eyes of arrogant top-down planners, clueless modern architects, and ignorant bureaucrats, and offered a vote of confidence in the superior power of spontaneous order, which for her meant the ability of ordinary people to fashion a satisfying form of urban life without the "help" of the accredited experts. Despite the withering contempt of experts and allies alike - even the architectural critic Lewis Mumford, letting his unfortunate susceptibility to vanity get the better of him, could not resist dismissing Death and Life as a "preposterous mass of historic misinformation and contemporary misinterpretation" assembled by "a sloppy novice" - this unaccredited journalist-mother, with no college education, no training in planning, and no institutional support, wrote a book that would change the way the world thinks about cities.