Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pennsylvania.* Her father was a physician and her mother taught school and worked as a nurse. After high school and a year spent as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, Jacobs went to New York, where she found a succession of jobs as a stenographer and wrote free-lance articles about the city’s many working districts, which fascinated her. In 1952, after a number of writing and editing jobs ranging in subject matter from metallurgy to a geography of the United States for foreign readers, she became an associate editor of Architectural Forum. She was becoming increasingly skeptical of conventional planning beliefs as she noticed that the city rebuilding projects she was assigned to write about seemed neither safe, interesting, alive, nor good economics for cities once the projects were built and in operation. She gave a speech to that effect at Harvard in 1956, and this led to an article in Fortune magazine entitled "Downtown Is for People," which in turn led to The Death and Life of Great American Cities. The book was published in 1961 and produced permanent changes in the debate over urban renewal and the future of cities.



Thirty years after its publication, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning....[It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book's arguments."


Mrs. Jacobs is widely recognized as one of the founders of the "new urbanism", a movement which has over the intervening years gained growing prominence as an alternative to conventional approaches to land use and transportation planning.* Death and Life, her first book, was published in 1961 at the height of the technocratic projects led by powerful architects and city planners which were then pillorying the central areas of America's cities. Her book challenged planners and decision-makers to retain common sense, careful observation, and personal experience as the basis for their work. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jacobs's small masterpiece is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It is sensible, knowledgeable, readable, indispensable. She made her central point in these words:


"The processes that occur in our cities are not arcane, capable of being understood only by experts. They can be understood by almost anybody. Many ordinary people already understand this; they simply have not considered that by understanding these ordinary arrangements of cause and effect, we can also direct them if we want to."


But she did not stop there. For close to half a century Mrs. Jacobs has championed the city as a natural and vital human habitat which brings together people in sufficient concentrations for the flourishing of commerce, culture and community. She emphasizes the necessity of protecting, what she calls, the "social capital" of the city: that intricate web of human relationships built up over time and that provides mutual support in time of need, ensures the safety of the streets, and fosters a sense of civic responsibility.


In this great book Mrs. Jacobs captures the life of traditional cities, much as an anthropologist records the characteristics of a culture on the verge of extinction, for understanding by later generations. The great and enduring value of her book is its powerful description of the human reality and dynamic behind the theories and visions and the necessity of understanding these in order to plan successfully for communities and transportation systems.She makes the point that two things are central to maintaining the social capital of any place:


1. A great deal of diversity at the neighborhood level so that people can remain in their local area even as their housing needs, jobs, and lifestyles may change; and


2. Agreeable, esliy accessibe settings for casual public contact, including good sidewalks, public spaces, and neighbourhood stores.


Jacobs was an early and prescient voice warning that what was being billed as urban renewal--big housing projects, highway building, creation of business districts, etc.--was actually destroying neighborhoods and creating more problems than it was solving. Subsequent events of the past forty years have certainly borne out her argument that the planners were killing cities. But she did not stop there: she then showed the way as to how we can start to do better, step by small step. That and her personal example are what make her so very important as we look to the future.