Jacobs, Jane

Jane Jacobs (1916–) was raised in the suburbs of Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of a doctor and a nurse. Following high school, she moved to New York City and worked as a secretary and freelance writer, producing pieces on city life for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. During the 1940s, she wrote for industrial trade publications and then the U.S. government's information agency; she also became an active union organizer.

Jacobs's greatest influence came with the publication in 1961 of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that grew out of her work as an associate editor at Architectural Forum from 1952 to 1962. In it, she attacked the policies of urban renewal and rejected the ideas that underpinned modernist planning. Jacobs blended that critique with personal observations from her own neighborhood in the West Village of New York City, where she lived with her husband, architect Robert H. Jacobs, and their three children. 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, along with the urban renewal administrators who empowered them, failed to recognize the gap between their idealized visions and the complex dynamics of urban life.

After leaving the Architectural Forum in 1962, Jacobs fought for the principles in her book as a neighborhood organizer and civic leader. Her most significant victories included defeating urban renewal plans for the West Village neighborhood (1961–1962), developing an alternative middle-income housing project designed by residents (West Village Houses, 1962–1974), and halting the implementation of a proposed Lower Manhattan expressway (1962, 1968). Amid the tumultuous political climate of the later 1960s, Jacobs was arrested twice, once for protesting the Vietnam War draft and once for disrupting a state expressway hearing. In 1968, citing U.S. imperialism and two draft-age sons, Jacobs moved her family to Canada. After immigrating to Toronto, she led a movement with Marshall McLuhan to defeat the Spadina expressway (1969–1971) and advised the reform administrations of Mayors David Crombie (1974–1978) and John Sewell (1978–1980) on the St. Lawrence Neighborhood, a mixed-income housing development.

Jacobs's writings on cities achieved international influence, and many of her practical insights, such as the idea that more “eyes on the street” make neighborhoods safer, have become standard wisdom in the very fields of urbanism that originally rejected her as an uncredentialed outsider. Jacobs subsequently completed her urban trilogy with The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), books that, while less popular or controversial, continue to shape the thinking of urban economists and political scientists. Her other writings have branched into the areas of ethics, ecology, social criticism, and even children's literature.