Chapter 15 Summary

In this chapter Jane Jacobs talks about slums in cities and the process of “unslumming” them. She believes that unslumming fails because it ignores the major problem by trying to find solutions to just little issues. She says that to be successful in unslumming you must look at the people living in the slum and instead of trying to solve the problem thinking of the slum’s inhabitant as incompetent you must give them respect. In the chapter Jacobs describes a perpetual slum which is a slum that people move in and out of very quickly. When people move out the slum too quickly it causes the slum to never move to a better status. Jacobs says that the first sign of a slum is a dull, boring neighborhood. If the neighborhood is dull it will not attract families or younger people because they are not desirable places to live and then the neighborhood will lack diversity. Jacobs main require to unslum a neighborhood is its ability to support a city’s diversity. And Jacob’s also believes that if a neighborhood has self- diversification then it will not be a slum.