Jacobs, Jane, 1916-2006

<p>Jane Jacobs was a daughter of Pennsylvania, but her first and most influential book, about cities and the misguided attempts to plan them, made her a citizen of the world.

In her 1961 book, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," Mrs. Jacobs was the first to challenge the federally funded highway and urban renewal projects and public housing policies that were devastating older neighborhoods in cities like New York and Pittsburgh.

The book, translated into Japanese and several European languages, was derided as the work of a novice by her critics, but she lived long enough to see it become a bible to later generations of architects and planners.</p>
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"It was the first really strong challenge to modernists' conceptions of urban renewal and rebuilding cities," Pittsburgh urban designer David Lewis said last night. "It reminded us that cities belong to people and the most successful streets are the streets that have the most people on them."

"A sacred text," architect Robert Stern called "Death and Life" in November 2000, moments before Mrs. Jacobs accepted the $25,000 Vincent Scully Prize at Washington, D.C.'s National Building Museum. It was a lifetime achievement award and a chance to say thank you to a woman who almost single-handedly changed the direction of American city planning.

With her son James nearby, Mrs. Jacobs died yesterday morning in her sleep in a Toronto hospital, just a few days shy of her 90th birthday. She had been in declining health and entered the hospital a few days ago.
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The daughter of a doctor and a former school teacher, Jane Butzner was born in Scranton and moved to New York City in the 1930s, where she wrote for magazines and newspapers. During World War II, she worked in the Office of War Information, where she met architect Robert Jacobs, her future husband and mentor.

By the 1950s she was the mother of three children, a writer and editor at Architectural Forum and a neighborhood activist. In the early 1960s, she helped defeat powerful New York City parks commissioner Robert Moses' plan to run an expressway through Washington Square. Her observations of everyday life on Hudson Street in her Greenwich Village neighborhood were the basis of "Death and Life."

"Forty years ago, when most Americans held dense urbanism in considerable contempt, Jane Jacobs helped us see the city not as a terrible tyranny but as a great liberation, the ultimate freedom," Mr. Stern said at the awards ceremony in 2000. "She did this with a book, which burst on the scene with a force quite unlike that of any previous book" -- a book "so cogent and so sensible that real people could actually participate in an intelligent discussion of architecture and urbanism."
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Mrs. Jacobs was against interstate highways plowing through city neighborhoods and against the generic, homogenous suburbs they fed. She was for organic growth and economic and cultural diversity; short, walkable blocks with attractive sidewalks; apartments above stores; and buildings oriented to the street. She favored all that protected the "social capital" of the city, the human relationships that make the city hum.

"She saw that a whole structure of professional thought and practice relating to the city was indeed destructive of the city," said Dr. Scully, Yale professor emeritus, at the presentation of his namesake award. "She perceived and convinced a vast public that something which everyone believed was right was in fact utterly wrong."

In a 2001 survey conducted by Columbia University, Mrs. Jacobs surfaced as the writer/theorist who most influenced the thinking of the nation's architectural writers and critics.

Because of their opposition to the Vietnam War and a desire not to see their two teenage sons drafted to fight in it, Jane and Robert Jacobs moved their family to Toronto in 1968; Mrs. Jacobs became a Canadian citizen in 1974.</p>

Jane Jacobs (née Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal"/"slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.[1][2]

Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from "urban renewal"/"slum clearance", in particular Robert Moses' plans to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway,[3] which would have passed directly through SoHo, Manhattan and Little Italy, Manhattan. She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project.[4] After moving to Toronto in 1968, she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto planned, and under construction.[5][6]

As a mother and a writer who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning,[7][8] Jacobs endured scorn from established figures[who?]. She was described as a housewife first[9], as she did not in fact have a college degree or any formal training in urban planning; in consequence, her lack of credentials was seized upon as grounds for criticism.[10][11]

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail. The impact of Jane Jacobs's observation, activism, and writing has led to a 'planning blueprint' for generations of architects, planners, politicians and activists to practice.

Jacobs saw cities as integrated systems that had their own logic and dynamism which would change over time according to how they were used. With an eye for detail, she wrote eloquently about sidewalks, parks, retail design and self-organization. She promoted higher density in cities, short blocks, local economies and mixed uses. Jacobs helped derail the car-centered approach to urban planning in both New York and Toronto, invigorating neighborhood activism by helping stop the expansion of expressways and roads. She lived in Greenwich Village for decades, then moved to Toronto in 1968 where she continued her work and writing on urbanism, economies and social issues until her death in April 2006.

A firm believer in the importance of local residents having input on how their neighborhoods develop, Jacobs encouraged people to familiarize themselves with the places where they live, work, and play.

PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, PA; died April 25, 2006, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; immigrated to Canada; naturalized Canadian citizen; daughter of John Decker (a physician) and Bess (Robison) Butzner; married Robert Hyde Jacobs, Jr. (an architect), 1944; children: James Kedzie, Edward Decker, Mary Hyde. Education: Attended Columbia University.

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CAREER:
Urban theorist. After spending a year as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, went to New York where she worked as a stenographer and wrote free-lance articles about the city's working districts. Has had a number of writing and editing jobs, ranging in subject matter from metallurgy to geography of the United States for foreign readers. Architectural Forum, associate and senior editor, 1952-62. Community activist; served on New York Planning Board Number 2, on Mayor John V. Lindsay's Task Force on Housing, and on President Lyndon B. Johnson's Task Force on Natural Beauty.</p>