Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, one of the 20^th century’s greatest writers on economics, society and urban life died last month at the age of 89. She was best known for her 1961 masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

It would be difficult to overstate Jacobs’ significance, not only to architecture and city planning but to economics as well. But even though Death and Life was once called “the most influential work in the history of town planning” by The New York Times, today much of it reads like a list of roads not taken and opportunities lost. 

True, no one today disputes that Jacobs was right in her early criticism of “Towers in a Park”-style urban housing projects—cities stopped building such projects long ago, though their dark legacy lives on. And several of her spirited fights to save Manhattan’s great neighborhoods were successful, including her struggle against Robert Moses’ attempt to cut a freeway through Soho, and her fight to stop an “urban renewal” scheme that would have knocked down 14-square blocks of Greenwich Village and replaced it with high-rises. 

But whatever benefit Jacobs’ activism had for New York City (and later, Toronto), her opposition to single use, low-density, pedestrian-unfriendly planning had no impact on the sprawl machine that spread out across the nation in the second half of the 20^th century. Had we listened to Jane Jacobs, we would we have preserved and created more distinctive, vibrant communities instead of becoming a land of strip-malls, and our society as a whole would not be perched so far out on the limb of oil dependency.

Though less known, Jacobs’ later work on cities and the economy of nations was equally important. Here her defining insight was that contrary to common sense notions, rural economies were dependent on cities, and not vice-versa; she even made a case that that cities pre-dated subsequently spawned agriculture itself. 

Thus, as we enter the era of energy scarcity, it is worth keeping two of Jacobs’ central observations in mind:  First, that cities are necessary, even primary, to civilization and that which we value in it; and second that true city life cannot be lived inside a car on a highway, and that strip malls and sprawl represent urban destruction, not progress.

Let’s hope that we can learn more from this visionary writer in the era to come than we did while she was alive.