Urban Thinker, Jane Jacobs Rest Peacefully | Women Lifestyle, Fashion, Health, Beauty and Personality

Urban Thinker, Jane Jacobs Rest Peacefully
Category : Women Business, Women Personality

Jane Jacobs pic “Designing a dream city is easy,” she said. “Rebuilding a living one takes imagination.”
Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist and community activist whose books argued for the rehabilitation of neighborhoods on traditional lines, breaking with emerging trends in city development, died Tuesday. She was 89.

Jane Jacobs, the writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet of her own Greenwich Village street and came up with a book that challenged and changed the way people view cities.
In her best known book, influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jacobs criticized redevelopment efforts in many large cities, known at the time as “urban renewal.” She led protests against urban highway projects that would have razed established but run down neighborhoods. Instead, she proposed development work to keep diverse neighborhoods connected, and policies to emphasize pedestrian traffic in cities over automobiles.

She was internationally known as an advocate of cities with distinct neighborhoods, built to a human scale, mixing commercial and residential space.
She was against building highways that cut through city centers and was once arrested at a public hearing after she stormed the podium to express her opposition to a plan for an expressway through lower Manhattan.

In the course of a long life she wrote several major books including, The Economy of Cities (1969) The Wealth of Nations (1984), a controversial book advocating Quebec sovereignty. The Question of Separatism (1980), Systems of Survival (1992) The Nature of Economies (2000) and Dark Age Ahead (2005).

In her last volume, Dark Age Ahead (2004), Jacobs warned against nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it. Typically, she relied on the kind of quiet, inexorable logic that made her impossible to ignore.
“The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others,” she wrote, “making it more likely that others will give way. With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely, until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.”

Many people tried to label her, calling her everything from an amateur to an economist. She hated being pinned down, but the designation she allowed was urbanologist, a thinker about cities. Though she was never rude, posturing or confrontational, she wouldn’t hesitate to tell a room full of professionals precisely why they were wrong. And she was just as likely to call her supporters to account as her critics.
At one convention, organized in Toronto by a group of admirers, she listened to a delegation from China as they talked about how her books had influenced a housing scheme for migrant workers. Jacobs responded politely but made it clear the project was a complete misrepresentation of her ideas.

The AP obituary has a quote from her editor, Jason Epstein (”She inspired a kind of quiet revolution. Every time you see people rise up and oppose a developer, you think of Jane Jacobs.”) and Robert Moses biographer, Robert Caro (”far-sighted genius who guided cities in new directions”)

In honor of urban thinker extraordinaire Jane Jacobs, Curbed teaming up with Lisa Chamberlain at Polis to sponsor a contest to name the Most Jane Jacobs Block in New York City. As Lisa puts it, “The idea is to celebrate the ’street ballet’ of your favorite block,” keeping in mind Jane Jacobs’ neighborhood tenets, but with your own spin.