"In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs defends the complexity, vitality, and diversity of older cities against the massive post-World War II shift of resources and people to US suburbs. She praises mixed uses of space and describes the “sidewalk ballet” of storekeepers, neighbors, and strangers that keeps a street lively and safe at all hours of day and night. But she condemns the “great blight of dullness” imposed by bureaucratic urban planners and the modernist template of urban design. Their power, unchecked by community “self-organization” and citizen participation, creates isolated “towers in the park,” empty green spaces, and unsafe streets. Although these ideas were rejected by dominant urban planning writers at the time, they influenced later generations of politicians and planners and became the key ideas underlying urban revitalization, historic and community preservation, and gentrification."