Introduction
The big city is an embodiment of industrial progress and the development of urbanization. There are a great number of big cities on the current territory of the United States of America. Every city is both beautiful and terrible in its way; the criminal deeds are all over the streets of big cities, and the enormous parks are the best place to walk with children.
The city of Detroit is discussed as a city of crime, but a more specific problem is the economic and social roots of crime. The urbanization made Detroit one of the greatest industrial cities of the United States of America; apparently, it became one of the worst cities to live in.
Detroit is believed to be a dystopia; an imaginary place where everything is as bad as it can be. The current essay is to discuss whether this opinion has the right to exist or whether it should be rejected as a bogus claim. The essay gives an analysis of two books written by different authors; both writers tried to depict the city of Detroit within the perspectives for development.
A big city as represented by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities
The book The Death and Life of Great American Cities is written by Jane Jacobs. The author of this book made specific research on the city structure and on the relationships between the social and economic position of people and the crime level from the point of view of safety of the streets.
Another book Made in Detroit is written by Paul Clemens who tried to introduce his memoirs raising a range of problems within the industrial city. The author made an attempt to show the inner world of the neighborhood of the black population of industrial districts and the white one.
Jane Jacobs represented the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities which gives a specific description of life in the big city, its advantages and drawbacks. In her book, the author introduces the idea about the exceptionality of each city represented in the book.
At the same time, she makes emphasis on a great number of different problems, such as the economic and social position of people related to the level of crime; a place of hard work and a cultural center. Jacobs’ representation resembles the results of the research made in the streets of a big city; the city is considered a place to live, to work, and to walk in the park.
The big city is described from the point of view of peculiar nature of cities, where one can find a safe and not very safe place for the family to live, for children to play, the neighbors to communicate. The author also discusses the conditions for city diversity, forces of decline and regeneration, and a number of different tactics for planning and rebuilding cities.
Detroit in Paul Clemens’ Made in Detroit
Another book is Made in Detroit; it tells a story about life in the big industrial city is represented by Paul Clemens. The author describes his personal experience of living in Detroit, all the hardships of such life and interactions with other people living there. This book tells rather about the neighborhood and interrelations between representatives of the urban territory with different colors of skin.
From the point of view of a representation of the economic and social problems within the two books, the book written by Jane Jacobs describes the conditions of the industrial districts within big cities. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities believes that there are safe places within the city and not very safe because safety can be considered as the safety of a place and as the safety of the neighborhood.
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities introduces her work as the research about the planning of the city structure; it criticizes the plans of rebuilding the districts. The brightest phrase of the book gives a notion of what the book is about: “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding” (Jacobs, 3).
Whereas Paul Clemens’ Made in Detroit represents the memoirs of the writer, the time when he lived with his family in the city of Detroit. That time made the author write about the city’s decline which was irrevocable. The majority contained the minority and the minority became the majority. The black inhabitants of the industrial city became the majority and the white representatives of Detroit were forced to live farther from the city center.
The economic and social problems are raised in two books
Both books tell the reader about the experience of encountering racial and ethnic diversities in the streets while involving other problems that caused the economic and social diversities. Clemens describes the division of the society into different classes; “As Catholics, we weren’t white trash we were working-class” (Clemens, 40).
Jacobs analyzes the city from the point of view of an ordinary woman, a mother of children that needs to play on the sidewalks. Some sidewalks are safe and others are not. The author also raises the question of the neighborhood: representatives of different ethnic groups, social classes, income levels are to “enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors” (Jacobs, 60).
The economic situation within the population of the industrial city results in the crime level and the further development of diversities between inhabitants of the big industrial city, the place where urbanized people live with their families which have specific problems and solve them in a specific way.
Conclusion
Detroit is one of the greatest cities within the United States of America; it is also a big center of industrial development and technical progress. The big cities are believed to be built only for the people who work there and their families because the planning and reconstruction of the industrial districts of such cities do not presuppose recreational activities and cultural events.
Detroit is considered to be a dystopia, an embodiment of all bad things and actions which can occur within the city boundaries. Urbanization caused the creation of industrial centers, suchlike Detroit. The level of crimes depends closely on the current economic and social situation within the city.
The economic problems involve the low-income rate and the social issue must be discussed from the point of view of division into the classes, where the low-class population is considered trash and is engaged into the maintenance personnel. The two books argue about the problems the inhabitants of the big industrial cities are involved in. Jane Jacobs analyzes the safety and construction of cities and Paul Clemens shares his own experience of life in the industrial city of Detroit.
Works Cited
Clemens, Paul. Made in Detroit. New York: Anchor Books, 2005.
Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992.