March's Must-Reads: Mystery, Romance, and Thrills Await!
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.
In opposition to the kind of large-scale, bulldozing
government intervention in city planning associated with
Robert Moses and with federal slum-clearing projects, Jacobs
proposed a renewal from the ground up, emphasizing mixed use
rather than exclusively residential or commercial districts,
and drawing on the human vitality of existing neighborhoods:
"Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for
understanding, communicating, contriving, and inventing what
is required to combat their difficulties.... Lively,
diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own
regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems
and needs outside themselves." Although Jacobs's lack of
experience as either architect or city planner drew
criticism, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities was quickly recognized as one of the most
original and powerfully argued books of its day. It was
variously praised as "the most refreshing, provocative,
stimulating, and exciting study of this greatest of our
problems of living which I have seen" (Harrison Salisbury)
and "a magnificent study of what gives life and spirit to
the city" (William H. Whyte).
Jacobs is married to an architect, who she says taught her
enough to become an architectural writer. They have two sons
and a daughter. In 1968 they moved to Toronto, where Jacobs
has often assumed an activist role in matters relating to
development and has been an adviser on the reform of the
city's planning and housing policies. She was a leader in
the successful campaign to block construction of a major
expressway on the grounds that it would do more harm than
good, and helped prevent the demolition of an entire
neighborhood downtown. She has been a Canadian citizen since
1974. Her writings include The Economy of Cities
(1969); The Question of Separatism (1980), a
consideration of the issue of sovereignty for Quebec;
Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), a major
study of the importance of cities and their regions in the
global economy; and her most recent book, Systems of
Survival (1993).