Jane Jacobs has Passed

Last Tuesday Jane Jacobs passed away after a yearlong illness and several strokes, the most recent last Saturday. With her passing, cities and those of us who love them lost a true friend and ally. Ms. Jacobs died in a hospital in Totonto, where she had made her home for nearly forty years. She and her husband, the architect Robert Jacobs left New York in protest that their taxes supported the war in Viet Nam, and to protect their two sons from conscription. They never returned to the United States to reside.

Ms. Jacobs turned Urban Planning and Sociology itself on their heads with her landmark publication The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961. She foresaw the destruction rent on our cities by suburban sprawl. She argued that a crowded street was safer than a deserted one, that vibrant neighborhoods were preferable to bucolic, pastoral suburbs, and that cities should be built for people, not for cars.

Those of us who love cities, who eschew the automobile, who prefer to walk and live among our neighbors, who see an organic value in neighborhood centered commerce and activities, lost perhaps the best friend we will ever have with the passing of Jane Jacobs. Although she has passed from our midst, her work lives on and still forty-five years later, it serves as a blueprint for the urban renewal projects that many cities are undertaking in an effort to counter the urban blight and suburban sprawl that she so accureately forecast.