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Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. By Sharon Zukin. Oxford University Press 309pp, Pounds 17.99. ISBN 9780195382853. Published 7 January 2010
Like the cops who chase the gangsters across New York in the 1948 film noir Naked City, Sharon Zukin travels from district to district, describing "How Brooklyn became cool", "Why Harlem is not a ghetto" and "Living local in the East Village" in a slightly futile pursuit of "authenticity".
Naked City is written as a critique and update of Jane Jacobs' canonical work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), which, although out of date, is still essential reading for any student of the city and is ripe for revision. Jacobs argued for a city of lively streets at human scale in which barren open spaces unpoliced by the human eye should be kept to the minimum. She won a...