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Jane Jacobs
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Jane Jacobs

1916–2006

Journalist and activist who in 1961 showed that planners were destroying the very thing that makes a neighbourhood work.

Jacobs watched her own street in Greenwich Village and described what the urbanism of the day could not see: that safety comes not from the police but from «eyes on the street», people going in and out of shops and doorways at different hours. That requires mixed uses, short blocks and buildings of different ages.

Her book stopped urban motorways and changed the discipline, though her legacy is now invoked in both directions: by those defending neighbourhood life and by those opposing new housing. She is worth reading with that in mind.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916, without a university degree, Jacobs was working as a journalist at Architectural Forum when she wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), the most widely read attack on postwar urban renewal. Against housing projects and expressways, she defended streets with lively pavements, mixed uses, short blocks, old buildings and density, and the eyes on the street that watch it without police. At the same time, she led the neighbourhood resistance that stopped Robert Moses's expressway through Lower Manhattan.

In 1968 she moved to Toronto, where she helped stop the Spadina Expressway, and went on writing about economics: The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) argue that innovation is born in diverse cities and not in nations. Critics point out that her ideal neighbourhoods, such as Greenwich Village, ended up gentrified, and that her work says little about race and power; she died in 2006 as the reference for every urbanism that starts from the street.

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