Jane Jacobs, Her Death and Life

Today is truly a sad day for cities. Urban scholar, activist and enthusiast for all that is complex, gritty and beautiful, Jane Jacobs died early today at her home in Toronto. She was 89.

Jacobs moved to New York City (the metropolis about which she would eventually wax so poetically and fight for so passionately) in the middle of the Great Depression. Just finished with high school in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she was in search of something new. She took on a variety of journalism jobs before beginning a two-year stint at Columbia University, where she dabbled in a disparate range of fields from political science and economics to zoology.

Known primarily for her writings, Jacobs studied cities at a time when many urban centers were suffering the tragic decay of complacent neglect and the rise of the automobile was encouraging the nascent expanse of suburbs into the farmlands of the urban fringe.

Her defining book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, was a scathing rebuke of the then-popular trend toward razing dense, walkable urban neighborhoods in favor of vast, barren wastelands of public housing projects and highway access ramps. Far from simply an anti-intellectual diatribe, it was a clarion call for sensible policies based on everyday observations of the urban environment. Neighborhoods should be dense to support a range of small businesses. Sidewalks should be wide to favor people over cars. Blocks should be short to ensure multiple path choices for pedestrians.

Her basic premise was that the most genuine and successful cities are those that feature dense, diverse and small-scaled neighborhoods that encourage walking and interaction. (Think of Boston's North End, New York's Greenwich Village.) In her words, "lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration."

One of her defining moments was the storied fight against New York City Uber-Planner Robert Moses. Moses, perhaps the most politically influential city planner since Hausmann of mid-19th Century Paris, was responsible for the huge housing projects of Harlem and the Bronx and the many highways criss-crossing the five boroughs. He famously wanted to connect the Hudson and East Rivers with a highway cutting through Washington Square Park and the East Village. Jacobs led the fight against the proposal, successfully leaving Greenwich Village to remain the gritty artist- and musician-rich neighborhood that it is today.

In the late '60s, in protest of the Vietnam War, she moved to Toronto with her husband and children, but that didn't prevent her from continuing her crusade. After Death and Life she published numerous subsequent books (such as Cities and Wealth of Nations) expanding on the mechanics of city vibrancy. More recently, she was a voice of caution against the proposed west side stadium in Manhattan and the massive Atlantic Yards development still anticipated in downtown Brooklyn.

Her insights have inspired countless "students of the city" and informed nearly every‚ planning and city policy decision of the last four decades. Doubtless they will continue to to influence us far into the future as we continue to revive the vibrant urban environments that say so much about the diversity and complexity of the human character.

In her honor, if you don't already, give public transportation a try. Take a walk down your block. Enjoy a sidewalk cafe. People-watch. Be an activist.

For more information on her life, her ideas and her writings, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs