Rereading: The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs | Books | The Guardian
▻https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/oct/14/jane-jacobs-death-and-life-rereading
In Donald Barthelme’s 1974 short story “I Bought a Little City”, the narrator decides one day to purchase Galveston, Texas, where he then tears down some houses, shoots 6,000 dogs, and rearranges what remains into the shape of a giant Mona Lisa jigsaw puzzle visible only from the air. As with much of Barthelme’s work, the premise seems so absurd that one can’t help but shake it until a metaphor falls out, and here one might well assume that, in the words of the novelist Donald Antrim, “I Bought a Little City” is “a take on the role that a writer has in writing a story – playing god, in a certain way”. But Barthelme first arrived in Greenwich Village, where he would live for most of the rest of his life, in the winter of 1962, just as local campaigners were narrowly defeating an attempt by the despotic city planner Robert Moses to run a 10-lane elevated highway through the middle of Washington Square Park. For decades, Moses really did play god with New York, and for anyone who ever lived within his kingdom, "I Bought a Little City’, which was first published in the New Yorker, might not have seemed so absurd after all.
Le livre en pdf : ▻https://www.dropbox.com/s/s7fa8mwpeblk568/jane_jacobs_the_death_and_life_of_great_american.pdf?dl=0
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