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Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban crusader

Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban crusader
Apr. 27, 2006. 12:28 PM
WARREN GERARD
TORONTO STAR
Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Mrs. Jacobs died this morning (April 25) in Toronto. She was 89.

An American who chose to be Canadian, Mrs. Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.

Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland tunnel on the west ended contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the west side of Greenwich Village.

In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.

Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the “foot people”....
continue reading: Toronto Star, http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1145976509962&call_pageid=968332188492



For another good article published by openDemocracy:

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006): cities for life
Roger Scruton
2 - 5 - 2006
Jane Jacobs's book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" changed the way people thought about urban planning, the street and the character of cities. Roger Scruton reflects on the relevance of its message today.[/b]

Jane Jacobs wrote little, held no academic position, and espoused views that were widely dismissed as reactionary and impractical. But to turn now to her The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, is to encounter a store of wisdom and insight that the intervening years have only served to confirm.

Jacobs, who died in Toronto on 25 April 2006, was perhaps the first person to see clearly that cities can be successful only if they solve a huge problem of coordination, and that theories of the market which argued for the impossibility of solving such problems by a comprehensive plan, ought equally to apply to cities. Cities, she argued, should develop spontaneously and organically, so as to enshrine in their contours the unintended results of the consensual transactions between their residents; only then will they facilitate the peaceful evolution of urban life. A true city is built by its residents, in that every aspect of it reflects something that results from what uncountably many residents have wanted, rather than something that a few experts have planned.
(....)
But they also illustrate the way in which her own preference for "spontaneity" over "planning" cannot, in the end, be sustained. It is not planning that has destroyed the American city, but the wrong kind of planning directed towards the wrong kind of things.(....)
Continue reading: openDemocracy, http://www.opendemocracy.net/ecology-urbanisation/jacobs_3492.jsp#
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