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<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>For all the Visionaries who really want to be
visionary, think a moment about Jane Jacobs and her marvelous contributions to
the course of American cities, including our own.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>All the best and thanks for a lifetime of effort,
Jane Jacobs,</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2>Linda Pall</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT face=Arial size=2></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message -----
<DIV style="BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B> <A
title=makingplaces@pps.org href="mailto:makingplaces@pps.org">Project for Public
Spaces</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>To:</B> <A title=lpall@moscow.com href="mailto:lpall@moscow.com">Linda
Pall</A> </DIV>
<DIV><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, April 26, 2006 3:38 PM</DIV>
<DIV><B>Subject:</B> Remembering Jane Jacobs, 1916 - 2006</DIV></DIV>
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<H1>Remembering Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006</H1>
<P><IMG style="MARGIN-LEFT: 5px"
src="http://www.projectforpublicspaces.org/content/mailers/making_places_bulletin/april2006/jjacobs.jpg"
align=right>Anyone who ever met Jane Jacobs or read her books couldn't
help but be infected by her enthusiasms. She loved cities and celebrated
the life that teems within them. She articulated better than anyone how
the best ideas about making cities great come not from theories and master
plans but from careful observation of what goes on around us. This was a
startling, radical idea when she first proposed it in the 1950s and 60s,
and it changed the way North Americans think about cities. </P>
<P>But above all else, Jane Jacobs loved people. Whether chronicling the
habits of fellow city-dwellers or organizing a campaign with her neighbors
to save important places from destruction, she was always engaged in the
life of her community.</P>
<P>It is hard to imagine a world without Jane Jacobs, harder still to
imagine what shape our cities would be in had she never come along. Today
her books are classics, taught in universities all over the world. Her
ideas are well-known by planners, architects, and activists everywhere.
But at the time <I>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</I> was
released in 1961, she was a brave, singular voice challenging the dominant
theories of the entire planning establishment. Without any formal training
in city planning, she managed to transform the field. Indeed, her lack of
a degree in architecture, planning or even journalism is often cited as
the secret of her wisdom and innovation. She took a fresh look at what
makes cities work and what makes them fail, never blinded by the
assumptions and orthodoxy of a particular profession. Jane Jacobs was a
true original.</P>
<P>One of her earliest champions was <A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680148">William
"Holly" Whyte</A>, then an editor at Fortune Magazine who encouraged her
to write a series of articles in the late 1950s that became the basis for
<I>Death and Life</I>. Later in life, Jane always professed a special
affinity for Holly, who had gone on in the early 1970s to create the
Streetlife Project, which in turn led to the founding of Project for
Public Spaces. She was one of the first people to visit the PPS office in
1975, and we were fortunate to have spoken with her and shared our
progress every few months in recent years. Her advice, encouragement, and
dedication to the cause of making places great have been invaluable to us
and to our mission.</P>
<P>It has become fashionable of late for certain architects and critics
infatuated by high design to pooh-pooh her thinking as rigid and
out-of-date. But such groundless criticism has never made even a dent in
her legacy, since so many people from so many fields have been influenced
and inspired by her wisdom.</P>
<P>We are greatly saddened by Jane Jacobs' death yesterday, but confident
that her infectious love for cities will be carried on by many followers
far into the future. We will miss her dearly.</P>
<P><I>-- The Staff of Project for Public Spaces</I></P>
<P>For more about the life and ideas of Jane Jacobs, see the excerpt below
from <A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680149">her
profile on pps.org</A>:</P>
<P>Jane Jacobs was an urban writer and activist who championed new,
community-based approaches to planning for over 40 years. Her 1961
treatise, <I>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</I>, became
perhaps the most influential American text about the inner workings and
failings of cities, inspiring generations of urban planners and activists.
Her efforts to stop downtown expressways and protect local neighborhoods
invigorated community-based urban activism and helped end Parks
Commissioner Robert Moses's reign of power in New York City. </P>
<P>Jacobs had no professional training in the field of city planning, nor
did she hold the title of planner. She instead relied on her observations
and common sense to illustrate why certain places work, and what can be
done to improve those that do not. Together with William H. Whyte, Jacobs
led the way in advocating for a place-based, community-centered approach
to urban planning, decades before such approaches were considered
sensible. </P>
<P>"With humility and common sense, she taught the world how to understand
and value cities through direct observation, persistent questioning and
discovery. Her faith in the wisdom of local citizens lives on in the civic
battles in which she participated and her wisdom lives on in the writing
of her nine seminal books." -- <I>The Center for the Living City at
Purchase College</I></P>
<P>"Probably no single thinker has done more in the last fifty years to
transform our ideas about the nature of urban life." -- <I>Chicago
Tribune</I></P>
<P>"Jane Jacobs' observations about the way cities work and don't work...
revolutionized the urban planning profession. Thanks to Jacobs, ideas once
considered lunatic, such as mixed-use development, short blocks, and dense
concentrations of people working and living downtown, are now taken for
granted." -- Adele Freedman, <I>The Globe and Mail</I></P>
<P>"Jane Jacobs, the world-famous apostle of livable cities, almost
single-handedly reshaped the way urban planners think about their
profession. Planners hated her book when it came out, but it's required
reading in universities around the world." -- Alexander Ross, <I>Canadian
Business</I></P>
<P>"Both critics and admirers have attached the word 'anarchist' to her,
because she believes in power being exercised by individuals or people in
small groups rather than big governments and corporations. Jane Jacobs
believes that most problems, if solvable at all, will be solved not by the
elaborate schemes of experts but by spontaneous invention." -- Robert
Fulford, <I>Imperial Oil Review</I></P>
<P>"<I>Mrs. Jacobs' Protest Results in Riot Charge:</I> Jane Jacobs, a
nationally known writer on urban problems, was arraigned in Criminal Court
yesterday and charged with second-degree riot, inciting to riot and
criminal mischief. The police had originally charged that Mrs. Jacobs
tried to disrupt a public meeting on the controversial Lower Manhattan
Expressway. 'The inference seems to be,' Mrs. Jacobs said, 'that anybody
who criticizes a state program is going to get it in the neck.'" -- <I>The
New York Times</I>, April 18, 1968</P><A name=biography>
<H3>Biography</H3></A>
<P>Jacobs was born in 1916 in the coal mining town of Scranton,
Pennsylvania, the daughter of a doctor and a former school teacher and
nurse. After graduating from high school, she took an unpaid position as
the assistant to the women's page editor at the <I>Scranton Tribune</I>. A
year later, in the middle of the Depression, she left Scranton for New
York City. During her first several years in the city she held a variety
of jobs, working mainly as a stenographer and freelance writer, often
writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she
claims, "...gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and
what business was like, what work was like." While working for the Office
of War Information she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs.</P>
<P>In 1952 Jacobs became an associate editor of <I>Architectural
Forum</I>, allowing her to more closely observe the mechanisms of city
planning and urban renewal. In the process, she became increasingly
critical of conventional planning theory and practice, observing that many
of the city rebuilding projects she wrote about were not safe,
interesting, alive, or economically sound. She gave a speech on this issue
at Harvard in 1956, and William H. Whyte invited her to write a
corresponding article in <I>Fortune</I> magazine, titled "Downtown is for
People." In 1961 she presented these observations and her own
prescriptions in the landmark book <I>The Death and Life of Great American
Cities</I>, challenging the dominant establishment of modernist
professional planning and asserting the wisdom of empirical observation
and community intuition.</P>
<P>During the 1960s Jacobs also became involved in urban activism,
spearheading local efforts to oppose the top-down neighborhood clearing
and highway building championed by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert
Moses. In 1962 she became the chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the
Lower Manhattan Expressway, in reaction to Moses' plans to build a highway
through Manhattan's Washington Square Park and West Village. Her efforts
to stop the expressway led to her arrest during a demonstration in 1968,
and the campaign is often considered one of the turning points in the
development of New York City. Moses had previously pushed through the
Cross-Bronx Expressway and other motorways despite neighborhood
opposition, and the defeat of the Lower Manhattan Expressway was an
important victory for local community interests and an instigator of
Moses's fall from power. Jacobs' harsh criticism of "slum-clearing" and
high-rise housing projects was also instrumental in discrediting these
once universally supported planning practices.</P>
<P>In 1968 Jacobs moved with her family to Toronto, in opposition to the
Vietnam War. In Toronto, she remained an outspoken critic of top-down city
planning. In the early 1970s she helped lead the <I>Stop Spadina
Campaign</I>, to prevent the construction of a major highway through some
of Toronto's liveliest neighborhoods. She also advocated for greater
autonomy of the City of Toronto, criticized the bloated electric company
Ontario Hydro, supported broad revisions in Toronto's Official Plan and
other planning policies, and opposed expansion of the Toronto Island
Airport.</P>
<P>After publishing <I>The Death and Life of Great American Cities</I>,
her interests and writings broadened, encompassing more discussion of
economics, morals, and social relations. Her subsequent books include
<I>The Economy of Cities</I> (1969); <I>The Question of Separatism</I>
(1980), an analysis of the question of sovereignty for Quebec; <I>Cities
and the Wealth of Nations</I> (1984), a major study of the importance of
cities and their regions in their nations and thus also in the global
economy; <I>Systems of Survival</I> (1993); and most recently <I>The
Nature of Economies</I> (2000). She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and
lived in Toronto until her death on April 25th, 2006.</P><A
name=perspectives>
<H3>Perspectives</H3></A>
<P><B>Cities as Ecosystems</B><BR>Jacobs approached cities as living
beings and ecosystems. She suggested that over time, buildings, streets
and neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in response to
how people interact with them. She explained how each element of a city -
sidewalks, parks, neighborhoods, government, economy - functions together
synergistically, in the same manner as the natural ecosystem. This
understanding helps us discern how cities work, how they break down, and
how they could be better structured.</P>
<P><B>Mixed-Use Development</B><BR>Jacobs advocated for "mixed-use" urban
development - the integration of different building types and uses,
whether residential or commercial, old or new. According to this idea,
cities depend on a diversity of buildings, residences, businesses and
other non-residential uses, as well as people of different ages using
areas at different times of day, to create community vitality. She saw
cities as being "organic, spontaneous, and untidy," and views the
intermingling of city uses and users as crucial to economic and urban
development. </P>
<P><B>Bottom-Up Community Planning</B><BR>Jacobs contested the traditional
planning approach that relies on the judgment of outside experts,
proposing that local expertise is better suited to guiding community
development. She based her writing on empirical experience and
observation, noting how the prescribed government policies for planning
and development are usually inconsistent with the real-life functioning of
city neighborhoods.</P>
<P><B>The Case for Higher Density</B><BR>Although orthodox planning theory
had blamed high density for crime, filth, and a host of other problems,
Jacobs disproved these assumptions and demonstrated how a high
concentration of people is vital for city life, economic growth, and
prosperity. While acknowledging that density alone does not produce
healthy communities, she illustrated through concrete examples how higher
densities yield a critical mass of people that is capable of supporting
more vibrant communities. In exposing the difference between high density
and overcrowding, Jacobs dispelled many myths about high concentrations of
people. </P>
<P><B>Local Economies</B><BR>By dissecting how cities and their economies
emerge and grow, Jacobs cast new light on the nature of local economies.
She contested the assumptions that cities are a product of agricultural
advancement; that specialized, highly efficient economies fuel long-term
growth; and that large, stable businesses are the best sources of
innovation. Instead, she developed a model of local economic development
based on adding new types of work to old, promoting small businesses, and
supporting the creative impulses of urban entrepreneurs.</P><A
name=quotable>
<H3>Quotable</H3></A>
<P>"Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old
buildings."</P>
<P>"Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of
settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have
difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance. But
vital cities are not helpless to combat even the most difficult
problems."</P>
<P>"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only
because, and only when, they are created by everybody."</P>
<P>"Vital cities have marvelous innate abilities for understanding,
communicating, contriving, and inventing what is required to combat their
difficulties... Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their
own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs
outside themselves."</P>
<P>"Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather
than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the
core of the phenomenon... Decaying cities, declining economies, and
mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not
coincidental."</P>
<P>"In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity."</P>
<P>"As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience
of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of
subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense."</P>
<P>"...that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something
that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find
incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the
sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true.
The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities
should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also
be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated..."</P>
<P>"Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of
chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form
of order."</P>
<P>
<H3>Links</H3>
<P></P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680150">Jane
Jacobs Interviewed by Jim Kunstler</A>, September 2000.</P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680151">Urban
planning guru Jane Jacobs on the traps we set for ourselves</A>, by
Anne-Marie Tobin, <I>Canoe</I>, March 27, 2000.</P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680152">The
Convention Follies, Part 5: A Conversation with Jane Jacobs</A>, by Hank
Bromley, <I>ARTVOICE</I>, vol 11 num 30, July 27, 2000.</P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680153">City
Views: Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New
Urbanism, and her legacy</A>, by Bill Steigerwald, <I>Reason Magazine</I>,
June 2001.</P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680154">Urban
Economy and Development: Interview of Jane Jacobs</A>, by Roberto Chavez,
Tia Duer, and Ke Fang, The World Bank Group, February 4, 2002.</P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680155">Cities
and Web Economies: Interview with Jane Jacobs</A>, by Blake Harris, <I>The
New Colonist</I>, December 1, 2002.</P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680156">It's
Everyone: A Panel Discussion with Jane Jacobs, Olivia Chow, Joan Doiron,
Marilou McPhedran, Lisa Salsberg and Sue Zielinski.</A></P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680157">Ideas
That Matter</A></P>
<P><A
href="http://en.groundspring.org/EmailNow/pub.php?module=URLTracker&cmd=track&j=74223505&u=680158">Healthy
Cities, Urban Theory, and Design: The Power of Jane Jacobs</A></P></TD><!-- left column -->
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