Rigor isn’t the only thing that can make a book important and worth reading. When reading a book which is considered a “classic” in a field, which was written 50 years ago by a person who was not trained in that field, I would not expect a lot of rigor or use the book to assess the standard of research in that field. I’d focus more on the ideas, the implications of the ideas (e.g., where they conflict with existing practices), the style of thinking, and the value of the methods used. For instance, careful observation is an important technique in many fields for developing beliefs and models that are entangled with reality, though it is often more useful for generating hypotheses than for testing them.
My issue isn’t so much with the book (it’s an impressive achievement considering Jacobs’ wasn’t even a college graduate, much less a trained urban planner) but the fact that the field doesn’t seem to have advanced passed it—that even today it’s still one of the very best books on the subject.
The fact that an old not-very-technical book is still considered great doesn’t necessarily mean that the field hasn’t progressed, it could just mean that the book did a good job of presenting ideas that are still considered important today and that the book was important historically in the development of the field. Books which are recommended as an introduction to a field (often to non-specialists) don’t need to contain the latest research results or in-depth data analysis.
Rigor isn’t the only thing that can make a book important and worth reading. When reading a book which is considered a “classic” in a field, which was written 50 years ago by a person who was not trained in that field, I would not expect a lot of rigor or use the book to assess the standard of research in that field. I’d focus more on the ideas, the implications of the ideas (e.g., where they conflict with existing practices), the style of thinking, and the value of the methods used. For instance, careful observation is an important technique in many fields for developing beliefs and models that are entangled with reality, though it is often more useful for generating hypotheses than for testing them.
My issue isn’t so much with the book (it’s an impressive achievement considering Jacobs’ wasn’t even a college graduate, much less a trained urban planner) but the fact that the field doesn’t seem to have advanced passed it—that even today it’s still one of the very best books on the subject.
The fact that an old not-very-technical book is still considered great doesn’t necessarily mean that the field hasn’t progressed, it could just mean that the book did a good job of presenting ideas that are still considered important today and that the book was important historically in the development of the field. Books which are recommended as an introduction to a field (often to non-specialists) don’t need to contain the latest research results or in-depth data analysis.