Jane Jacobs: an Influential Thinker about Cities

01Jane Jacobs was an American activist, writer, and economist.

02She is widely considered an influential thinker about urban planning in the 1900s.

03Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1916.

04As a young woman, she had many interests, including economics, law, science, and politics.

05Her higher education was brief, however.

06Jacobs did not complete her college education.

07While working as a writer for the Office of War Information, she met a building designer named Robert Jacobs.

08In 1944, they married.

09They later had three children.

10Experts have described Jacobs as a writer who wrote well, but not often.

11She is best known for her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

12The book was published in 1961.

13It is still widely read today by both city planning professionals and the general public.

14In the book, Jacobs criticized the urban renewal projects of the 1950s.

15She believed these policies destroyed existing inner-city communities and their economies.

16Jacobs also thought that modern planning policies separated communities and created unnatural city areas.

17Jacobs described the nature of cities, their streets and parks, the different cultures represented by citizens, and the safety of a well-planned city.

18Jacobs wrote that peace on the streets of cities is not kept mainly by the police, although police remain necessary.

19Peace is kept by a system of controls among the people living in a place.

20She believed the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by spreading people out more thinly.

21Jane Jacobs spent her life studying cities.

22She wrote seven books on urban planning, the economy of cities, and issues of commerce and politics.

23Her last book, published in 2004, was Dark Age Ahead.

24In it, Jacobs described several major values that she believed were threatened in the United States and Canada.

25These included community and family, higher education, science and technology, and a government responsive to citizens' needs.

26Jane Jacobs had her critics.

27Many of them argued that her ideas failed to represent the reality of city politics.

28Others argued that Jacobs had little sympathy for people who want a lifestyle different from the one she proposed.

29Jane Jacobs died in 2006 in Toronto, Canada, at the age of 89.

30Her family released a statement on her death.

31It said, What's important is not that she died, but that she lived, and that her life's work has greatly influenced the way we think.

32I'm John Russell.