https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_JacobsJane Jacobs OC OOnt (born Jane Butzner; May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was a Canadian and American journalist, author, and activist best known for her influence on urban studies. Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that urban renewal did not respect the needs of most city-dwellers. The book also introduced sociology concepts such as "eyes on the street" and "social capital".
Working for the State Department during McCarthyism, Jacobs received a questionnaire regarding her political beliefs and loyalties. Jacobs was anti-communist, and had left the Federal Workers Union because of its apparent communist sympathies. Nevertheless, she was pro-union and purportedly appreciated the writing of Saul Alinsky; therefore she was under suspicion. On March 25, 1952, Jacobs delivered a now-famous response to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board at the United States Department of State. In her foreword to her answer, she said:
The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe …In 1956, Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University, standing in for Douglas Haskell of Architectural Forum. She addressed leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals (including Lewis Mumford), speaking on the topic of East Harlem. She urged this audience to "respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order." Contrary to her expectations, the talk was received with enthusiasm, but it also marked her as a threat to established urban planners, real estate owners, and developers. Architectural Forum printed the speech that year, along with photos of East Harlem.
Jacobs is credited, along with Lewis Mumford, with inspiring the New Urbanist movement. She has been characterized as a major influence on decentralist and radical centrist thought. She discussed her legacy in an interview with Reason magazine.
Reason: What do you think you'll be remembered for most? You were the one who stood up to the federal bulldozers and the urban renewal people and said they were destroying the lifeblood of these cities. Is that what it will be?
Jacobs: No. If I were to be remembered as a really important thinker of the century, the most important thing I've contributed is my discussion of what makes economic expansion happen. This is something that has puzzled people always. I think I've figured out what it is.
Expansion and development are two different things. Development is differentiation of what already existed. Practically every new thing that happens is a differentiation of a previous thing, from a new shoe sole to changes in legal codes. Expansion is an actual growth in size or volume of activity. That is a different thing.
I've gone at it two different ways. Way back when I wrote The Economy of Cities, I wrote about import replacing and how that expands, not just the economy of the place where it occurs, but economic life altogether. As a city replaces imports, it shifts its imports. It doesn't import less. And yet it has everything it had before.
Reason: It's not a zero-sum game. It's a bigger, growing pie.
Jacobs: That's the actual mechanism of it. The theory of it is what I explain in The Nature of Economies. I equate it to what happens with biomass, the sum total of all flora and fauna in an area. The energy, the material that's involved in this, doesn't just escape the community as an export. It continues being used in a community, just as in a rainforest the waste from certain organisms and various plants and animals gets used by other ones in the place.
While Jacobs saw her greatest legacy to be her contributions to economic theory, it is in the realm of urban planning that she has had her most extensive impact. Her observations about the ways in which cities function revolutionized the urban planning profession and discredited many accepted planning models that dominated mid-century planning. The influential Harvard Economist Edward Glaeser, known for his work on urban studies, acknowledged that Jane Jacobs (1960s) had been prescient in attacking Moses for "replacing well-functioning neighborhoods with Le Corbusier-inspired towers." Glaeser agreed that these housing projects proved to be Moses' greatest failures, "Moses spent millions and evicted tens of thousands to create buildings that became centers of crime, poverty, and despair."— Jane Jacobs, "City Views: Urban studies legend Jane Jacobs on gentrification, the New Urbanism, and her legacy", Reason, June 2001, Interviewer: Bill Steigerwald
After reading the text of her Harvard speech, William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write a piece for Fortune magazine. The resulting piece, "Downtown Is for People", appeared in a 1958 issue of Fortune, and marked her first public criticism of Robert Moses. Her stance – particularly her criticism of the Lincoln Center – was not popular with supporters of urban renewal at Architectural Forum and Fortune.[30] It particularly outraged C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Fortune, who demanded of Whyte over the phone: "Who is this crazy dame?"
The Fortune piece brought Jacobs to the attention of Chadbourne Gilpatric, then Associate Director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation. The Foundation had moved aggressively into urban topics, with a recent award to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for studies of urban aesthetics that would culminate in the publication of Kevin A. Lynch's Image of the City. In May 1958, Gilpatric invited Jacobs to begin serving as a reviewer for grant proposals.[19] Later that year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Jacobs to produce a critical study of city planning and urban life in the US. (From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, the foundation's Humanities Division sponsored an "Urban Design Studies" research program, of which Jacobs was the best known grantee.)[19] Gilpatric encouraged Jacobs to "explor[e] the field of urban design to look for ideas and actions which may improve thinking on how the design of cities might better serve urban life, including cultural and humane value."[19] Affiliating with The New School (then called The New School for Social Research), she spent three years conducting research and writing drafts. In 1961, Random House published the product of her research: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains one of the most influential books in the history of American city planning. It introduces terms like "social capital", "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the street", which became popular in urban design, sociology, and other fields. Jacobs painted a devastating picture of the entire profession of city planning, labeling it a pseudoscience. This led to angry responses from various rich and powerful men. Jacobs was criticized as a "militant dame" and a "housewife": an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established discipline. Her book was also criticized from the left for leaving out race and accepting gentrification.
In 1962 she gave up her position at Architectural Forum to become a full-time author and mother. In addition to her local politics, she was a notable opponent of the Vietnam War, and marched on the Pentagon in October 1967. She criticized the construction of the World Trade Center as a disaster for Manhattan's waterfront.
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