Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs (1916 -2006) was a writer and community activist in New York+ and Toronto in the 1960s and 70s. She was influential in stopping various plans by Parks Commissioner Robert Moses as well as the Spandina Expressway+ in Toronto. She wrote the book Death and Life of Great American Cities+ based on her experiences in these cities. It is in this book that she created that now famous phrase eyes on the street+ [1], referring to the casual security effects of having many people simply using the street for everyday life.

Early Life

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 Scranton Tribune. 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+ .

First Steps

In 1952 Jacobs became an associate editor of Architectural Forum, 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 Fortune magazine, titled "Downtown is for People." Published in 1957, she noted that in order to truly see the city, "you need to get out and walk"

Book Author

In 1961 she presented her observations and her own prescriptions in the landmark book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, challenging the dominant establishment of modernist professional planning and asserting the wisdom of empirical observation and community intuition.

Becoming a community activist

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' 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.

The Toronto move

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 Stop Spadina Campaign, 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.

After publishing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her interests and writings broadened, encompassing more discussion of economics, morals, and social relations. Her subsequent books include The Economy of Cities (1969); The Question of Separatism (1980), an analysis of the question of sovereignty for Quebec; Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), a major study of the importance of cities and their regions in their nations and thus also in the global economy; Systems of Survival (1993); and most recently The Nature of Economies (2000). She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and lived in Toronto until her death on April 25th, 2006.