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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.
Apr 30, 2024 · Jane Jacobs (born May 4, 1916, Scranton, Pa., U.S.—died April 25, 2006, Toronto, Ont., Can.) was an American-born Canadian urbanologist noted for her clear and original observations on urban life and its problems. After graduating from high school, Butzner worked at the Scranton Tribune. She moved to New York City in 1934, where she held ...
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- Early Life
- New York
- Challenging The Consensus on Urban Planning
- Greenwich Village
- Toronto
- Summary of Ideas in The Death and Life of Great American Cities
- Jane Jacobs' Later Writings
- Selected Quotes
Jane Jacobs was born Jane Butzner on May 4, 1916. Her mother, Bess Robison Butzner, was a teacher and nurse. Her father, John Decker Butzner, was a physician. They were a Jewish family in the predominantly Roman Catholic city of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Jane attended Scranton High School and, after graduation, worked for a local newspaper.
In 1935, Jane and her sister Betty moved to Brooklyn, New York. But Jane was endlessly attracted to the streets of Greenwich Village and moved to the neighborhood, with her sister, shortly after. When she moved to New York City, Jane began working as a secretary and writer, with a particular interest in writing about the city itself. She studied at...
In 1952, Jane Jacobs began working at Architectural Forum, after the publication she’d been writing for before moving to Washington. She continued to write articles about urban planning projects and later served as the associate editor. After investigating and reporting on several urban development projects in Philadelphia and East Harlem, she came...
Jacobs became an activist working against the plans from Robert Moses to tear down existing buildings in Greenwich Village and build high rises. She generally opposed top-down decision-making, as practiced by "master builders" like Moses. She warned against overexpansion of New York University. She opposed the proposed expressway that would have co...
After her arrest, the Jacobs family moved to Toronto in 1968 and received Canadian citizenship. There, she became involved in stopping an expressway and rebuilding neighborhoods on a more community-friendly plan. She became a Canadian citizen and continued her work in lobbying and activism to question conventional city planning ideas. Jane Jacobs d...
In the introduction, Jacobs makes quite clear her intention: Jacobs observes such commonplace realities about cities as the functions of sidewalks to tease out the answers to questions, including what makes for safety and what does not, what distinguishes parks that are "marvelous" from those that attract vice, why slums resist change, how downtown...
Jane Jacobs wrote six other books, but her first book remained the center of her reputation and her ideas. Her later works were: 1. The Economy of Cities. 1969. 2. The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty. 1980. 3. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. 1984. 4. Systems of Survival. 1992. 5. The Nature of Economies. 2000. 6. ...
“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.” “…that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The...
Jane Jacobs OC OOnt ( née Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
Jul 9, 2021 · In 1958, urban activist Jane Jacobs wrote a piece for Fortune magazine entitled “Downtown is for People”. Like The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the now-classic book she published ...
Oct 26, 2011 · Tributes rained down when Jacobs died in 2006. In her first adoptive city, New York, where the Pennsylvania-born author and activist worked as a secretary and then as a journalist, the block of Hudson Street where she wrote The Death and Life towards the end of the 1950s was renamed in her honour as Jane Jacobs Way.
