Jane Jacobs: Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist and ommunity activist whose books argued for the rehabilitation of neighbourhoods on traditional lines, breaking with emerging trends in city development, died on Tuesday at the age of 89.
An American-born citizen of Canada, Jacobs died at a hospital in Toronto of natural causes, according to publicist Sally Marvin of Random House, her publisher. She was admitted to hospital late last week and had been in failing health for several years.
Jacobs was internationally known as an advocate of cities that have distinct neighbourhoods, are built to a human scale and mix commercial and residential space. She was against building highways that cut through city centres and was once arrested at a public hearing after she stormed the podium to show her opposition to a plan for an expressway through lower Manhattan.
"Jane Jacobs's thinking about cities was clear," Toronto mayor David Miller said on Tuesday. "She didn't just write about urban issues. She acted on her convictions."
Jacobs's most influential work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, (1961), set the stage for a battle that she waged for decades. Defying popular theories on how to renew city slums by plowing them down and replacing them with uniform housing projects, she pushed for recycled buildings and new structures scaled to the existing neighbourhood. Her feisty prose often read like a manifesto. "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding," she announced in the opening paragraph of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She continued: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women's magazines."
In her view, a successful city needed vibrant neighbourhoods linked by public transportation. Each area needed its own mix of old and new buildings, a constant influx of smaller, independent businesses and a range of residential and commercial space.
Early critics accused her of being short on realistic solutions. Admirers called her a maverick and a comprehensive thinker. Thirty years later, when her books were required reading in university programmes and many of her beliefs about cities were accepted, she was praised as a visionary and a pivotal figure in her field.
As a writer and community activist, Jacobs's most audacious outburst came in the 1960s when New York city planner Robert Moses announced his plan for an expressway through the Washington Square area in lower Manhattan.
In 1961 she led the opposition against a tear-down plan for her West Village neighbourhood of lower Manhattan. Redevelopers intended to take out the brownstones and small apartment complexes in the area and replace them with a housing project that covered several blocks.
Jacobs argued against demolition and offered her own proposal, which preserved existing housing and added a middle-income apartment complex built to scale. Eventually, the plan she helped devise was approved. "In the '60s, technocrats were leading the way in urban planning," architect Eric Owen Moss told the LA Times in 2003. "The technocrat said: 'We'll put an expressway here, a dam there, a high-rise here.' She said: 'Let's not build the expressway through peoples' backyards. Let's keep the continuity of the existing neighbourhood. And let's have parks.'"
Her credentials for the role of urban strategist were comparatively sparse. Jacobs was born on May 4th, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. When she graduated from high school, she worked briefly as a reporter for the Scranton Tribune before moving to New York. She attended Columbia University but did not complete her degree. She went on to work as a freelance journalist covering urban issues.
In 1952 Jacobs was hired by Architecture Forum magazine. She became a senior editor and remained on the staff until 1962. During the 1960s, she was appointed to a series of government projects, including New York task forces on housing and natural beauty.
She had gained both respect and notoriety in a male-dominated field. Then, somewhat abruptly in 1968, Jacobs and her husband of 24 years, architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, moved their family of three children to Toronto. The Jacobs had two sons, who were both close to draft age. The Vietnam War, which the they opposed, continued. In 1974, she became a Canadian citizen.
In The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) she argued that the financial health of a nation depended on productive cities. At 88, she toured to promote her book, Dark Age Ahead (2004), taking questions with the help of an old fashioned ear horn.
Her husband died in 1996. She is survived by two sons, one daughter, two grandchildren, two great grandchildren and a brother.
Jane Jacobs, born May 4th, 1916; died April 25th, 2006