THE ECONOMY OF CITIES by Jane Jacobs. 268 pages. Random House. $5.95.
Bless Jane Jacobs. Lively, lucid, blunt, original, she triumphs by being mostly wrong. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), took thousands of great-American-city dwellers by storm. Written in the heyday of urban renewal, it briskly pointed out that most big, supposedly progressive rebuilding projects were casting a "great blight of dullness" on the already tormented city dweller. In her ten years as an editor of Architectural Forum, she had seen plenty of such projects. The zesty...