The Death, Then Life, of Great American Cities

"Obama has used the anonymity and energy of cities -- where he has spent all of his adult life, first in college in Los Angeles and New York and then in Chicago's Hyde Park -- to forge his public persona and ready himself for the exposure of a political career. And he ran for president without apology as an urban candidate. In one video clip widely shared online, he can be seen telling a crowd that when he was young he wanted to be an architect. In another, he explains during a summer campaign stop that he is a fan of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Jane Jacobs' landmark 1961 study of fine-grained, up-close urbanism.

Just as in the inherently optimistic twist of that book's title -- not life before death but the reverse -- a sense of urbanism and public space reborn, or even brought back from the dead, seems guaranteed to glimmer through Obama's first 100 days. How long it can manage to hold a place in what promises to be an uncomfortably crowded policy spotlight, though, is very much an open question."