Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, OC OOnt (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been described as "one of 20th-century architecture's most traumatic events", but also credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.

Within months of the completion of her book (1961) which promoted a grassroots, organic, neighbourhood-based process to rehabilitate buildings, Jacobs learned that her 555 Hudson Street Greenwich Village home, was in an area targeted by Robert Moses for a $7 million urban renewal which would mean evictions and clearance of old buildings replaced by a carefully planned middle-income housing project.

The influential Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, known for his work on urban studies, acknowledged (2007-01-19) that Jane Jacobs (1960s) had been prescient in attacking Moses for "replacing well-functioning neighborhoods with Le Corbusier-inspired towers." Glaeser agreed that these housing projects proved to be Moses' greatest failures, "Moses spent millions and evicted tens of thousands to create buildings that became centers of crime, poverty, and despair (Glaeser 2007-01-19)."

Along with her well-known printed works, Jacobs is equally well known for organizing grassroots efforts to block urban-renewal projects that would have destroyed local neighborhoods. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and after moving to Canada in 1968, equally influential in cancelling the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto planned and under construction.