Jacobs, Jane (B. 1916)

U.S.-Canadian urban activist and writer

Born Jane Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and daughter of a prominent physician and a nurse, Jane Jacobs grew up in the suburbs of Scranton, where she observed the waning of the region's anthracite industry. At age twenty, she left the Scranton Republican newspaper, where she had worked since graduating from high school, and joined her sister in New York City. Even her earliest articles, produced during the 1930s as a freelance writer for magazines such as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, focused on the vitality of various neighborhoods. During the 1940s, she wrote for industrial trade publications and then the U.S. government's information agency while also becoming an active union organizer. She also met and married her husband, the architect Robert H. Jacobs.

Jacobs's greatest influence came with the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a book that grew out of her work as an associate editor of Architectural Forum (1952–1962). Inspired by William Kirk, director of the Union Settlement in East Harlem, she began to question the assumptions of architecture and city planning that underlay postwar urban renewal projects. Jacobs blended her broad critique with personal observations from her own neighborhood in New York's West Greenwich Village, where she lived with her husband and three children. Though no doctrinaire foe of cars in cities, she believed that a city's sidewalk life alone could guarantee safety and lead to the kind of contact between strangers necessary to engender tolerance. She characterized desirable city life in terms of four generators, or conditions, for urban diversity: mixed uses (commercial, industrial, residential), small city blocks, buildings of various kinds and ages, and concentrated population. In Jacobs's controversial view, modernist planners and architects failed to recognize the gap between their idealized visions and the complex dynamics of urban life.

After leaving the Architectural Forum in 1962, Jacobs organized and led community-based protests, drawing on the principles in her book. Her most significant victories included the defeat of urban renewal plans for the West Village neighborhood (1961–1962), the development of an alternative middle-income housing project designed by community residents themselves (West Village Houses, 1962–1974), and halting the implementation of a proposed lower Manhattan expressway (1962, 1968). Amidst the tumultuous political climate of the later 1960s, Jacobs was arrested twice, once for antiwar agitation as her sons approached draft age and once for disrupting a state expressway hearing. In 1968, citing U.S. imperialism, Jacobs moved her family to Toronto.

After immigrating to Canada, Jacobs's subsequent books focused increasingly on the economic and cultural underpinnings of sound urban communities. Jacobs describes her life's work as the enlargement of a single theme, perhaps best encompassed by the question of what makes certain communities thrive while others decay.