Urban Thinker Jane Jacobs Dies

[Lydia Leftcoast]

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning. Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89. Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a generation.

The strong themes of her writing and activism included opposition to expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban planning, saying they were killing inner cities and discouraging the economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/canada/national/2006/04/25/jacobs060425.html

[Canuckistanian]

1. That's too bad

She was the biggest critic of our Ontario Premier's idea of conglomerating small towns into nearby big cities.

The plan went ahead anyways and costs are escalating and services decreasing, just as she said.

Now, Jane is gone and the megacities are still here.

[harpboy_ak]

2. I learned a lot from her books

especially about what makes for a good livable community. She really wanted to see neighborhoods where everyone interacted and the community kept the streets safe for everyone, not gated "communities" full of snout houses with no street life. She was the first one to make me understand why suburbs are such a failure.

[NEOBuckeye]

3. Interesting. I'll have to check out her books! n/t

[depakid]

4. The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Was an incredible work.

Jane Jacobs was born ahead of her time.

[wicket]

5. She was a fantastic lady

She will be greatly missed.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

6. Yes, I happened to read her book shortly before

the trip that my family took to Europe back when I was in high school. It helped me appreciate the urban landscapes there (and later in Japan) and to see just how awful much of our urban (and especially suburban) landscapes are.

[JPZenger]

7. A great writer and thinker

If you haven't read it, read at least the first couple chapters of Life and Death of American Cities. The book is in most libraries. The book is 45 years old, but still stands the test of time. It never went out of print. It explains what makes cities and neighborhoods vibrant.

Jacobs got her start fighting the plans of Robert Moses to build a major east-west expressway across Lower Manhattan. It would have destroyed her neighborhood of Greenwich Village, the same way highways helped kill many areas of the South Bronx.

She stood for mixed uses and neighborhoods that develop over time. She opposed massive public works projects that used urban renewal (or "negro removal") to destroy neighborhoods.

[arendt]

8. Another great "public intellectual" passes away...

and the powers that be are doing their best
to discourage anyone from following in their
footsteps.

She moved mountains with nothing more than
simple logic and common sense.

Loved her take that CITIES produced agriculture,
not the other way around.

Although her death was not unexpected, it is
still sad.

arendt

[Minstrel Boy]

9. "Dark Age Ahead"

Jane Jacobs, writing in the Globe and Mail on the subject of her last book, published in 2004:

The subject itself is gloomy. A Dark Age is a culture's dead end. We in North America and Western Europe, enjoying the many benefits of the culture conventionally known as the West, customarily think of a Dark Age as happening once, long ago, following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past. Whatever happened to the culture whose people produced the splendid Lascaux cave paintings some seventeen thousand years ago, in what is now southwestern France? Or the culture of the builders of ambitious stone and wood henges in Western Europe before the Celts arrived with their Iron Age technology and intricately knotted art?

Mass amnesia, striking as it is and seemingly weird, is the least mysterious of Dark Age phenomena. We all understand the harsh principle Use it or lose it. A failing or conquered culture can spiral down into a long decline, as has happened in most empires after their relatively short heydays of astonishing success. But in extreme cases, failing or conquered cultures can be genuinely lost, never to emerge again as living ways of being. The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes literally lost?

This is a question that has practical importance for us here in North America, and possibly in Western Europe as well. Dark Ages are instructive, precisely because they are extreme examples of cultural collapse and thus more clear-cut and vivid than gradual decay. The purpose of this book is to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end, by understanding how such a tragedy comes about, and thereby what can be done to ward it off and thus retain and further develop our living, functioning culture, which contains so much of value, so hard won by our forebears. We need this awareness because, as I plan to explain, we show signs of rushing headlong into a Dark Age.

...

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture. Most of the million details of a complex, living culture are transmitted neither in writing nor pictorially. Instead, cultures live through word of mouth and example. That is why we have cooking classes and cooking demonstrations, as well as cookbooks. That is why we have apprenticeships, internships, student tours, and on-the-job training as well as manuals and textbooks. Every culture takes pains to educate its young so that they, in their turn, can practice and transmit it completely. Educators and mentors, whether they are parents, elders, or schoolmasters, use books and videos if they have them, but they also speak, and when they are most effective, as teachers, parents, or mentors, they also serve as examples.

[LisaLynne]

10. K&R for a great thinker. nt