aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Where/who is the Jane Jacobs of our time?
Jane Jacobs, the writer and thinker who brought penetrating eyes and ingenious insight to the sidewalk ballet of her own Greenwich Village street and came up with a book that challenged and changed the way people view cities, died today in Toronto, where she lived. She was 89.
She died at a Toronto hospital, said a distant cousin, Lucia Jacobs, who gave no specific cause of death.
In her book “Death and Life of Great American Cities,” written in 1961, Ms. Jacobs’s enormous achievement was to transcend her own withering critique of 20th-century urban planning and propose radically new principles for rebuilding cities. At a time when both common and inspired wisdom called for bulldozing slums and opening up city space, Ms. Jacobs’s prescription was ever more diversity, density and dynamism - in effect, to crowd people and activities together in a jumping, joyous urban jumble.
I loved Jane Jacobs’ New York. Interesting that she died in Toronto. Siva points to the Globe and Mail; Cory points to Canada.com; Michael, who lives near where she died, points to the Toronto Star.
On NPR last night Robert Caro explained how she beat Robert Moses.
Today’s equivalent of the urban battles of the 60s is the internet/telecom/copyright fight. Just as communities lost every battle before the Lower Manhattan Expressway, we’ve been losing every battle to date.
We need today a Jane Jacobs-like figure who can inspire and mobilize us in that arena as effectively as Jane did in the urban arena. I like to believe we’ve just begun to fight.
