Jane Jacobs
Jane Butzner Jacobs (born 1916) is a writer, activist, and city aficionado. She was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania and now lives in Toronto, Ontario. In 1944 she was married to Robert Hyde Jacobs. She has two sons, James Kedzie, born 1948, and Edward Decker, born 1950.
Brief biography
Jane Jacobs completed high school in 1933. She then went on to study at Columbia University in the School of General Studies for two years. She took courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. About the freedom to study her wide-ranging interests, she has stated:
- For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education.1
Her first job was for a trade magazine, first as a secretary, then as an editor. She also sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune. She then became a feature writer for the Office of War Information.
On March 25, 1952 Jane Jacobs responded to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board in the United States Department of State. In her foreword to her answer she stated:
- ... The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe...2
Blocking expressways, and supporting neighborhoods seems to be a common theme in her life. In 1962 she was chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, when the downtown expressway plan was killed. She was again involved in stopping the Lower Manhattan Expressway, and was arrested during a demonstration on April 10, 1968. Jacobs opposed Robert Moses, who had already forced through the Cross-Bronx Expressway and other motorways against neighborhood opposition. A PBS documentary series on New York's history devoted a full hour of its four-hour length strictly to the battle between Moses and Jacobs.
In 1969 she had moved to Toronto, and was involved in stopping the Spadina Expressway. A common theme of her work has been to question whether we are building cities for people or for cars. She has been arrested twice during demonstrations. (source Ideas that Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs).
Jacobs is a strong advocate of a Province of Toronto to separate the city proper from Ontario. Jacobs says, "Cities to thrive in the 21st century, must separate themselves politically from their surrounding areas."
In 1997 the City of Toronto sponsored a conference titled Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, and led to a book by the same name. At the end of the conference, The Jane Jacobs Prize was created. It includes an annual stipend of $5,000 for three years to be given to "celebrate Toronto's original, unsung heroes — by seeking out citizens who are engaged in activities that contribute to the city's vitality."
List of books and ideas on how cities work
Jane Jacobs has spent her life studying cities. Her books include:
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
- The Economy of Cities (1969)
- The Question of Separation (1980)
- Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984)
- Systems of Survival (1992)
- The Nature of Economies* (2000)
- Dark Age Ahead (2004)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities is her single most influential book, and quite possibly the most influential US book on urban planning. Widely read by both by planning professionals and the general public, the book was a strong critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s which, she claimed, destroyed communities and created isolating, unnatual urban spaces. Instead Jacobs advocated dense, mixed-use neighborhoods as found in traditional American cities.
Systems of Survival moves outside of the city, studying the moral underpinnings of work. As with her other work, she used an observational approach. This book is written as a Mafia and communism, and what happens when New York Subway Police are paid bonuses for each arrest they make.
The Nature of Economies draws numerous and detailed parallels between human economies and natural ecosystems. Many of the groundbreaking economic ideas first expressed in The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations are reiterated here - reinterpreted slightly as a part of the larger analysis.
Criticism of Jane Jacobs
One of the recurring criticisms of Jacobs is that her work is "impractical" and does not reflect the "reality" of urban politics, which are often totally controlled by real estate developers and suburban politicians. A response to such critics is to point to the history of cities like New York City and Detroit, which were devastated in the 1960s and 1970s as suburban populations grew, took control of the politics of the surrounding region, and voted to starve cities to feed suburban sprawl, leaving burned-out city cores in deep debt. This fed the 'vicious cycle' of more departures to the suburbs.
