Jane Jacobs

American-born Canadian writer Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) revolutionized the field of urban planning with her pathbreaking 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

In the book Jacobs launched a broadside against the concepts of urban renewal that were fashionable at the time. The seeming disorder and unpredictability of cities, she argued, were actually signs of their vitality, and the brave new world of high-rises envisioned by planners would strangle the buzzing street life that fostered community ties and drew newcomers with its energy. Jacobs backed up her ideas with action, leading several community efforts to resist the obliteration of urban neighborhoods by freeway construction. She was always a controversial figure with as many detractors as admirers, and as the central issue in planning evolved from urban renewal to urban sprawl, she took up other topics in her writing. Nevertheless, Jacobs lived long enough to see the vocabulary of city planning become infused with her ideas.

Held Imaginary Conversations

Jacobs was born Jane Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on May 4, 1916. Both her parents were Jewish, and both, uncommonly enough for the time, were professionals: her father was a doctor and her mother a schoolteacher. Jacobs was an indifferent student who preferred to read a book of her own, concealed under her desk, rather than listen to her teacher. Her real thinking and learning got done when she was sent to run errands by her family. As she walked, she conducted conversations with three imagined companions: U.S. president Thomas Jefferson, inventor Benjamin Franklin, and a Saxon tribal chief named Cerdic who was a character in an English historical novel she read.

Curiously enough, it was Cerdic who stirred her analytical mind. Later, doing housework, she found that "there were only two things in the entire house that were familiar to him, the fire (although he didn't understand the chimney) and the sword [a Civil War collectible]," she said in an interview, later quoted by Douglas Martin in her New York Times obituary. "Everything else had to be explained to him." After she finished high school, Jacobs was drawn to the bright lights of New York, which had entranced her on an earlier trip. "In 1928 I went there, with friends, and we came through the Holland Tunnel and right into the middle of the financial district, on a regular working day, and I was just flabbergasted by the number of people on the street and how they were all rushing around," she was quoted as saying in the Times of London. Jacobs never obtained a college degree, although she later took courses at Columbia University's adult-oriented School of General Studies.

Her first job was an unpaid newspaper internship in Scranton, but as soon as she could, she headed for New York and moved in with her sister, who was six years older. After she arrived, Jacobs would get on the subway each day, pick a stop at random, and apply for jobs at neighboring businesses. At the Christopher Street stop in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, she found a secretarial job with a candy company and soon an apartment in the colorful neighborhood she came to love. Jacobs and her sister had to scrape together a living in the later years of the Depression, sometimes subsisting on bananas for days at a time, but Jacobs became a confirmed New Yorker. She would live in Lower Manhattan for more than 30 years.

A quick study in almost any new area of knowledge, Jacobs began to write and contribute freelance articles to New York publications. She enjoyed wandering the city and investigating its various neighborhoods and industrial districts, and she wrote about topics ranging from the metals industry—she once penned an article about manhole covers—to sellers of furs in the Garment District. Her financial condition improved, and in April of 1944, while she was working for the federal Office of War Information, she and her two roommates threw a party at which one of the guests was architect Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr. She married him a month later, and the pair raised two sons and one daughter.

Worked as Architecture Editor

In 1952 Jacobs took a job as an editor at the magazine Architectural Forum. "I went to Architectural Forum, and they said well, you're now our school and hospital expert," Jacobs recalled to Paul Goldberger, writing in American Scholar. "That was the first time I got suspicious of experts. I knew nothing, not even how to read plans." With her husband's help, Jacobs mastered the knowledge she needed.

In the optimistic atmosphere of 1950s America, planners believed that urban design had the power to ameliorate poverty and other social problems. Block after block of the older neighborhoods of many cities were leveled and replaced with high-rise towers in parklike settings, some of them with rents subsidized for poorer residents, others quite luxurious. The process went by the name of slum clearance, or, more politely, urban renewal. Jacobs, in her architecture magazine post, had a front row view of the process, which was superintended by an almost exclusively male corps of city government officials. She went on assignment to Philadelphia, where planning director Ed Bacon showed her around a new development.

"First he took me to a street where loads of people were hanging around on the street, on the stoops, having a good time of it, and he said, well, this is the street we're going to get rid of," she recalled to Goldberger. "That was the 'before' street. Then he showed me the 'after' street, all fixed up, and there was just one person on it, a bored little boy kicking a tire in the gutter. It was so grim that I would have been kicking a tire, too. But Mr. Bacon thought it had a beautiful vista." She began to delve more deeply into urban planning, and she contributed an article to a Fortune magazine series that was later collected into a book, The Exploding Metropolis. Jacobs's husband, along with William H. Whyte, her editor at Fortune, urged her to write a book expressing her ideas about what made a city healthy or unhealthy, and, armed with a Rockefeller Foundation grant, she took to the streets of New York, notebook in hand. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published by Random House in 1961.

The book offered a broadside against several generations of received wisdom, and it has often been grouped with other books of the 1960s, written by nonspecialists, that overturned established thinking in their fields—Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique or Ralph Nader's Unsafe at Any Speed, for example. Jacobs took aim at a complex of ideas she referred to as Radiant Garden City Beautiful, or RGCB. A special target was Swiss architect Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris), a builder of modernist cubes who advocated a clean separation between residential, commercial, and recreational zones. In Jacobs's view, it was a mixture of these functions, as citizens crossed paths and exchanged goods and news, that gave a neighborhood vitality. She even contended that theaters and music spaces should be integrated into the neighborhoods of the populations they served.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities was not just a polemical attack, however; Jacobs also outlined what she saw as positive features of urban neighborhoods. They were fourfold. First, what would later be called mixed use was beneficial, with residential, retail, civic, and industrial buildings jumbled together and growing organically. Second, city blocks should be compact. Third, buildings should be diverse in age, condition, and size; Jacobs's ideas dovetailed effectively with the growing movement in favor of historic preservation. Finally, population should be dense. For Jacobs, the ideal neighborhood was often represented by her home of Greenwich Village, where she interacted with a wide range of individuals.

Opposed Expressway

In 1962, the year after The Death and Life of Great American Cities was published, Jacobs got the chance to move from the realm of theory into activism, when Greenwich Village was threatened by a proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway. The new road would have eliminated much of Washington Square Park and other Manhattan landmarks, and Jacobs soon emerged as a leader of residents opposed to the plan. The effort pitted Jacobs against New York's immensely powerful planning czar, Robert Moses, who did not receive news of the resistance gracefully. "There is nobody against this—NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY, but a bunch of … a bunch of MOTHERS," Jacobs recalled Moses saying during a meeting (according to Veronica Horwell of the London Guardian). Nevertheless, Jacobs and her associates emerged victorious when New York Mayor John Lindsay killed the project in 1969.

Some of the opposition to Jacobs's ideas had a similarly sexist tinge, as when noted architecture writer Lewis Mumford reviewed The Death and Life of Great American Cities in the New Yorker under the title, "Mother Jacobs' Home Remedy for Urban Cancer." Other criticisms of the book have been more substantive, however. Her observations were centered mostly on the older neighborhoods of the United States Northeast (not only in New York, but also including Boston's North End). "But the problems of the 20th-century were vast and complicated," observed Nicolai Ourosoff in the New York Times. Ms. Jacobs had few answers for suburban sprawl or the nation's dependence on cars, which remains critical to the development of American cities." The ideas of Jacobs, a committed liberal and civil rights activist, ironically later found support among conservatives who worked to restrict governmental eminent domain powers. Jacobs was deeply suspicious of eminent domain condemnations of city neighborhoods, telling Bill Steigerwald of Reason that "the courts have never given the kind of overview to this that they should."

In 1968, at her husband's suggestion, Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada, so that the couple's college-age sons could avoid being drafted and sent to serve in the Vietnam War. Jacobs remained in Canada for the rest of her life, later becoming a citizen of that country. Within months of moving to Toronto she had become involved in an ultimately successful effort to stop the building of an expressway that would have sliced through the city's Chinatown, and she found in Toronto a city that exemplified many of the principles she had espoused. She devoted many of her energies to issues facing her adopted country, and in 1980 she penned The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty, a controversial book that favored the secession of French-speaking Quebec from the rest of Canada. For Jacobs, the issue of Quebec's separatist aspirations was less one of cultural identity than one of local control.

Jacobs continued to write for the rest of her life, and she had two books in progress when she died in Toronto on April 25, 2006, at the age of 89. Her other works are much less well known than The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but they often contain fresh perspectives born of Jacobs's common-sense approach and autodidact procedures. Most of her books dealt with cities, but she turned increasingly to the macro dimension of urban existence rather than the micro level explored in her first book. The Economy of Cities (1969) disputed the common contention that great cities grew from the roots of productive agriculture; more often, Jacobs noted, innovations in agriculture, since the beginnings of human society, have depended on technology perfected in urban settings. Jacobs's Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) examined what Jacobs saw as an often intrinsic conflict between the organic development of cities and the ideologically driven constraints of policies implemented at the national level.

The last book published during Jacobs's lifetime was the gloomy Dark Age Ahead, issued in 2004; in that book Jacobs contended that the fundamental building blocks of North American society—community and family, higher education, science, taxation, and the influence of well-educated professionals—were eroding. By that time it was commonplace for young people graduating from a college or university to head for one of the North American cities with just the sort of diverse, well-preserved urban neighborhoods Jane Jacobs had championed: New York, Boston, Chicago, New Orleans, or San Francisco, for example. Those young people were Jacobs's intellectual progeny, and the continued existence of many of the neighborhoods themselves was her legacy.

Books

Alexiou, Alice Sparberg, Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary, HarperCollins, 2006.

Jacobs, Jane, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Random House, 1961.

Jacobs, Jane, The Economy of Cities, Random House, 1969.

Periodicals

American Scholar, Autumn 2006.

Architecture, June 2006.

Economist (U.S.), May 13, 2006.

Guardian (London, England), April 28, 2006).

Independent (London, England), June 3, 2006.

International Herald Tribune, April 27, 2006.

New York Times, April 26, 2006; April 30, 2006.

Reason, June 2001.

Time Canada, May 24, 2004.

Times (London, England), April 27, 2006.

Winnipeg Free Press, April 29, 2006.

Online

Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2006, reproduced in Biography Resource Center, Thomson Gale, 2006, http://www.galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC (October 31, 2006).

Jacobs, Jane 1916-2006

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Jane Jacobs was an original American social thinker whose books challenged mainstream views on urban planning and socioeconomic development. Devoid of any professional training, she used her own observations to develop an evolutionary perspective on cities, economy, and society. Jacobs was against social engineering, one-size-fits-all strategies, and big plans; instead, she stressed the importance of the human measure, diversity, and small-scale initiatives for development.

On May 4, 1916, Jacobs was born as Jane Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where her father was a family doctor. Shortly after graduating from high school she went to New York City and accepted all kinds of writing jobs. In the periods when she was unemployed, Jacobs took long city walks that gave her a notion of what was going on in urban and business life. In 1944 she married the architect Robert Jacobs, with whom she had three children. From 1952 to 1962 Jacobs worked as an associate editor of Architectural Forum ; thereafter she was regularly involved in neighborhood activism to oppose urban renewal in New York. In 1969 Jacobs moved with her family to Toronto, where she lived and wrote until her death on April 25, 2006.

Jacobs’s most significant works can be divided in two periods. In the first phase (Jacobs Mark I) she published three books on cities. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) Jacobs portrayed urban life as a “sidewalk ballet” that is served best by diverse, mixed, and densely populated neighborhoods with short building blocks. In The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) Jacobs used urban history and archaeology to show that cities always have been the driving force behind economic development. In the second phase (Jacobs Mark II) Jacobs shifted her attention to socioeconomic issues. Systems of Survival (1992) focused on the moral differences between people working in commerce (“traders”) and politics (“guardians”), whereas The Nature of Economies (2000) dealt with the similarities between the economy and the ecosystem (“biomimicry”); both books were written in the form of a dialogue between fictional New Yorkers. In her last book, Dark Age Ahead (2004), Jacobs warned that the decay of fundamental societal pillars (e.g., family and education) might lead to the deterioration of western civilization.

Undoubtedly, The Death and Life of Great American Cities was Jacobs’s most influential work. Her strong critique that traditional urban renewal policy only destroyed communities shocked planners and established Jacobs’s reputation as a radical thinker. Her writing style has been called “urban montage” (like snapshots of real city life) and thus is often dismissed as unscientific. Indeed, her analyses are rather anecdotal, unsystematic, and subjective, but that is exactly where their power lies: Unhindered by mainstream thinking, Jacobs could approach urban and socioeconomic issues in a relatively unbiased manner. Therefore it is not so much for the scientific analysis that Jane Jacobs’s books still deserve a wide read, but for the provocative and original insights they provide.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY WORKS

Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage.

Jacobs, Jane. 1969. The Economy of Cities. New York: Random House.

Jacobs, Jane. 1984. Cities and the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House.

Jacobs, Jane. 1992. Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics. New York: Random House.

Jacobs, Jane. 2000. The Nature of Economies. New York: Random House.

Jacobs, Jane. 2004. Dark Age Ahead. Toronto: Random House.

SECONDARY WORKS

Allen, Max, ed. 1997. Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs. Owen Sound: Ginger Press.

Alexiou, Alice Sparberg. 2006. Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary. Toronto: Harper Collins Publishers.

Hospers, Gert-Jan. 2006. Jane Jacobs: Her Life and Work. European Planning Studies 14: 723–732.

Gert-Jan Hospers

JACOBS, Jane

(b. 4 May 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania), award-winning writer and urban theorist whose Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) has been credited with changing the way in which many Americans view cities and their future.

Jacobs was born Jane Butzner, daughter of John Decker Butzner, a physician, and Bess Robison, a schoolteacher. She was raised in the heart of Pennsylvania's anthracite coal region. Although large-scale underground coal mining in the area continued until the end of the 1950s, the industry had already begun its decline when she was a child. This gradual decline forced hundreds of local residents to move in search of work. After graduating from high school, Jacobs worked briefly as a reporter for the Scranton Tribune before joining the exodus. She headed to New York City in 1934, settling eventually in Manhattan's Greenwich Village. While in New York, she studied briefly at Columbia University. To make ends meet, she worked as a freelance writer until landing an associate editor's job in 1952 with Architectural Forum. She was working on a freelance assignment for the Office of War Information when she met her future husband, architect Robert Hyde Jacobs. The couple had three children.

From her vantage point in the largest city in the United States, Jacobs was an eyewitness to the foibles and failures of post–World War II urban renewal, which planted the seed for her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961. The book, one of the most influential works in the history of city planning, took to task the much-vaunted urban renewal and garden city movements of the period. Jacobs minced no words. The opening sentence of her classic: "This book is an attack on current city planning."

The initial reaction of urban planners to Jacobs's attack was much as might be expected. Of Death and Life, Dennis O'Harrow, director of the American Society of Planning Officials, wrote in the society's newsletter: "The Jane Jacobs book is going to do a lot of harm … but we are going to have to live with it. So batten down the hatches." In the more than four decades since the book appeared, however, the attitude of city planners toward Jacobs's views changed significantly. Most planners refer to the book positively, and many cite it as a source of inspiration that drew them into the urban planning profession.

Interviewed by Jim Kunstler for Metropolis magazine in 2001, Jacobs discussed the factors that motivated her to write Death and Life: "Well, what was getting immediately under my skin was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal." She also expressed her anger at the dishonesty about what was being done.

Jacobs was also motivated to write her classic frontal assault on urban planning by a very real threat to her neighborhood of Greenwich Village. When the city's master planner Robert Moses proposed running a highway through the neighborhood's Washington Square Park and building a parking lot in Central Park, Jacobs felt compelled to speak out. In 2002 she told Maclean's, "I didn't inherit a great wish to be an activist. I was pushed into it by things that were just so outrageous."

What comes through loud and clear in Jacobs's book is her deep affection for New York City and, more specifically, the scores of neighborhoods scattered throughout it. In one of the book's best-known passages, she writes of her own neighborhood, calling it "an intricate sidewalk ballet." She explains, "I make my own entrance into it a little after eight when I put out the garbage can, as the droves of junior high school students walk by the center of the stage."

In the late 1960s Jacobs actively disagreed with the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. After one antiwar demonstration she was arrested, and both her sons declared publicly they would go to jail before serving in the overseas campaign. As her sons neared draft age in 1968, the Jacobs family decided to leave the United States and move to Canada. They settled in Toronto, where Jacobs eventually became a naturalized Canadian citizen. The change in residence did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm for writing. In 1969 she published The Economy of Cities, and wrote another four books over the next few decades, including Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984), and The Nature of Economies (2000).

Although she has no formal training in urban design or urban history, Jacobs for more than four decades has been a powerful force in the field of urban planning. In her writings, beginning with the classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs is fiercely critical of a planning style that has destroyed existing communities, separated land uses, and rebuilt sterile areas. With equal passion she advocates a fresh approach to planning in which greater attention is paid to the protection of neighborhoods and design details that truly matter to people.

The genius of Jacobs's vision is perhaps best summed up in Marcus Cunliffe's comments on Death and Life in Spectator: "No one who reads her arguments closely can avoid being exhilarated by her rare combination of good plain prose and good plain common sense."

Further information about Jacobs's life and career is in Roger Montgomery, "Is There Still Life in 'The Death and Life'?" Journal of the American Planning Association (22 June 1998); Jim Kunstler, "Jane Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler," Metropolis (Mar. 2001); Bill Steigerwald, "City Views," Reason (June 2001); and Robert Sheppard, "Jane Jacobs," Maclean's (1 July 2002).

Don Amerman

JACOBS, Jane

Born 4 May 1916, Scranton, Pennsylvania

Daughter of John and Bess Robinson Butzner; married Robert H. Jacobs, Jr., 1944; children: two sons and one daughter

After graduating from high school, Jane Jacobs worked on the Scranton Tribune, where she exhibited a special interest in the problems of working-class districts. As a freelance writer in New York City, she continued her study of the problems of urban centers. In interviews, Jacobs has often stated that her husband, an architect, has been a major influence upon her work. They have two sons and a daughter.

In 1952 Jacobs joined the staff of Architectural Forum as associate editor and specialized in analyzing the problems of cities such as Washington, Baltimore, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Jacobs contributed to Columbia University Forum, the Reporter, and Harper's. She also contributed to the new approach towards the study of city life in The Exploding Metropolis (1958). Jacobs's essay entitled "Downtown Is for People" foreshadowed her future works in the study of urban affairs.

In her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs sought to overturn the more conventional attitudes of urban planners and regional developers in the interest of preserving the vitality of cities, which she believes makes them both interesting and safe for their inhabitants. Jacobs's fresh approach to the subject brings into focus the uses of parks, sidewalks, and diversity on city streets. She stresses the importance of mixing residential and commercial needs in the same area and decries the urban planner's desire to change the character of urban communities by "cleaning them up," instead of rehabilitating old buildings. Jacobs correctly assesses the result of demolition of old buildings followed by the construction of massive housing projects as a loss of goods and services which undermines both the comforts and commerce of the city. Jacobs perceives both vandalism and decreased domestic spirit as a direct offshoot from the "blank walls" of the projects.

The problems at the heart of American cities are the lack of interest and understanding on the part of the theorists who control the future of the cities. Jacobs objects to the contemporary situation of urban planning, where actual programs derive their conceptual foundation from utopian cities, not found "in the streets" of the real world.

Jacobs's work is subjective, but although it avoids the stereotypical urbanologist jargon, it remains painfully aloof. It seems to some readers that Jacobs is trying to impose her own upper class values on the cities. Ultimately, her contribution to the contemporary field of urban studies remains imaginative, but represents no great progress over the work of her predecessors. Her portrayal of what she believes is the "real life" of cities appears sensationalist when juxtaposed against scholarly works; it is artificial and indeed almost a work of fiction when compared to other "real life" perceptions of the city.

In The Economy of Cities (1969), Jacobs modifies her tone to present a historical account of the growth of cities. She maintains that cities are not a mere outgrowth of an expanded rural economy, but were nourished on manufacturing and trade, which brought further growth to agricultural communities. Industrial growth is reliant upon innovation and a variety of types of work within a geographic area. Jacobs attempts to reverse the traditional approach to the study of urban areas by setting forth her belief that industry originated not in the household crafts, but in the cities, and then spread to the countryside. She uses the example of electrical power, which is sent to the city from the rural areas, but was first used in the city.

As in the case of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs portrays a far nicer fantasy than the utopian "City Beautiful" of other urbanologists, yet there is insufficient evidence for her claims that cities are diverse and original for the reasons she sets forth. As one critic has written, her analysis of urban growth is limited by its admiration for the innovative entrepreneur and its inattention to the role of corporations and government. Jacobs's work accurately describes the "other half" of the current urban plight, which has been overlooked by experts, yet she has made little effort to provide a bridge between the two extremes of urban ideology. It is her courage in the face of overwhelming "superblocks" that has brought Jacobs recognition for her ideas. Her works have been characterized as "spunky and informative cautionary documents," and they remain, for this reason, invaluable to the student of the modern city.

Bibliography:

Apolinsky, S. J., "Reweaving the Fabric Jane Jacobs at East Lake Meadows" (thesis, 1993). Ethics in Making a Living: The Jane Jacobs Conference (1989). Glaeser, E. L., Cities and Ethics: An Essay for Jane Jacobs (essay, 1998). Hill, D. R., Jane Jabobs' Ideas on Big, Diverse Cities: A Review and Commentary (journal, 1988). Ideas That Matter: The Worlds of Jane Jacobs (1997). Zotti, E., Eyes on Jane Jacobs (1986).

Other references:

Architectural Forum (July 1969). Atlantic (July 1969). Book World (18 May 1969). CSM (26 June 1969). Commentary (Aug. 1969). Commonwealth (5 Sept. 1969). LJ (1 June 1969). NR (7 June 1969). NY (14 June 1969). NYRB (1 Jan. 1970). NYTBR (1 June 1969). SR (5 July 1969).

—ILISE LEVY

Jacobs, Jane Butzner (1916–2006). American city planner and critic. Believing cities provide the foundation for civilization, she made her name with The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a sustained attack on the ‘urban renewal’ being promoted by architects and centralized agencies, arguing that such policies were killing the living organism that was the city, and demanding a new respect for self-generating urban forces to create social and economic diversity and well-being. She began her career as a critic with Architectural Forum in 1952, and her realization that the orthodoxies of CIAM and the Athens Charter (e.g. zoning and a free-for-all for motor-cars), which had permeated Government and professional circles, were strangling cities and ruining their diversity. She contributed an important chapter to The Exploding Metropolis (1958) in which she argued that ‘Downtown is for People’ at a time when traditional urban centres were dying. Her studies convinced her that when the principles advocated by Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard were applied (as they almost invariably were), they not only failed to stop decay, but actually made matters worse, causing immense social and economic problems as well. Drabness and uniformity were imposed where once there was charm and diversity. She rightly saw that cities were far more complex, like living organisms, than the simplistic notions of planners and architects would allow, and she advocated that the forces advancing social and economic diversity should be encouraged rather than destroyed. Claiming to investigate the ‘real life’ of the city (which she said orthodox planners ignored), she illustrated her points with many real case-histor-ies, pointing out that high density was not necessarily the same thing as overcrowding, and drawing attention to why certain areas were pleasant to live and work in, while others were not.

In her The Economy of Cities (1969) she emphasized the manufacturing and trade side of cities, and showed how they helped the development of rural areas, and how some cities flourished and others stagnated. Again she emphasized the importance of diversity, stressing that economic well-being rests with the many small, innovative, diverse businesses rather than with grand conglomerations and monopolies.

While her work became accepted and widely read, she herself complained that very little had changed and that the same mistakes were being ‘compulsively repeated’, not least because of the application of ‘urban studies’ and the use of myriad statistics to justify the same old panaceas, which were nothing of the sort. However, she undoubtedly encouraged the conservation movement, and in time many of her heretical ideas were adopted, despite vitriolic attacks on her by Banham and others.

Bibliography

J. Jacobs (1961, 1969, 1984, 1992, 1996)