Jane Jacobs (b. Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1916, d. Toronto, 2006) is widely recognized as a famed activist against highway and urban renewal projects and one of the key theorists of the life and design of cities. The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her first major book, is considered one of the most important books ever written about cities.
As an activist, Jane Jacobs is known for her leadership roles in preventing the bisection of Greenwich Village's Washington Square Park by an extension of Fifth Avenue (an effort that spanned from c. 1954-58); the demolition of her West Village neighborhood and home (c. 1961-62); and the construction of the Lower Manhattan Expressway (1962-68), which would have caused irreparable damage to Manhattan. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968, where she helped to stop construction of the Spadina Expressway (c. 1968-71). Common to all of her activist projects was a rejection of car-dependency and the destruction of public space, and a fight to maintain walkable and culturally and economically diverse cities. The destruction of diversity, including the car-dependency that exploded in 1950s America and now shapes much of the world, is part of what she later described as a “plantation mentality.”
After The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs wrote The Economy of Cities (1969), The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty (1980), Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984), Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992), The Nature of Economies (2000), and Dark Age Ahead (2004). The books follow a sequence of themes related primarily to urbanism, economic geography, and the ethical/institutional foundations of societies. Jacobs continued to write and develop book projects until her death in 2006.
Jacobs’s life and work spanned the major events and ideological changes of the twentieth century, from roughly the end of World War I to the years following the 9-11 terrorist attacks a short distance from her former Greenwich Village home. Her ideas continued to develop and evolve. Similarly, from the mid 1950s, when she first received public attention for her writing and activism, until today, the answer to the question "Who was Jane Jacobs?" has changed with new research, scholarship, and present-day concerns. Her work remains relevant. For example, although she wrote about the problems of car-dependency and single-use zoning more than a half century ago, many communities are only now beginning to see the problems. Many more do not even see them.
To better understand the full scope of her work, Becoming Jane Jacobs offers an essential foundation for understanding Jacobs's intertwined activities as a writer and activist, Death and Life, and her later books.
