Allan Jacobs

Allan B. Jacobs, born in Cleveland in 1928 and died in 2025 at 96, was director of the San Francisco Department of City Planning between 1967 and 1975, where he drove the 1971 Urban Design Plan that protected the views, the hills and the scale of the city against towers and freeways, and afterwards a professor at the University of California, Berkeley for decades. He had earlier worked in Pittsburgh and, with the Ford Foundation, in Calcutta.

Great Streets (1993) is his main work and one of the most influential books in urban design. Jacobs walked, measured and drew at the same scale streets from all over the world, from Barcelona's Rambla to Rome's Via dei Giubbonari and the Passeig de Gràcia, to ask what makes a street great: room to walk at leisure, physical comfort, spatial definition, qualities that engage the eye, transparency of buildings, complementarity, good maintenance and quality of construction. His one-square-mile plans of compared cities have become a method in themselves.

The Boulevard Book (2002), written with Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofé, rehabilitated the multiway boulevard, which engineers considered dangerous, showing with data that it works and is safe. Looking at Cities (1985) teaches how to read a city by walking it. He received the Kevin Lynch Award for Great Streets, and his lesson that the design of a street is a decision that can be studied and improved remains current.