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- City neighborhoods -
Jacobs criticizes orthodox urbanism for viewing the city neighborhood as a modular, insulated grouping of roughly 7,000 residents, the estimated number of persons to populate an elementary school and support a neighborhood market and community center.
Jacobs is credited with inspiring the New Urbanist movement.
After her death (April 2006) NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that June 28 was Jane Jacobs Day.
The City of Toronto proclaimed her birthday, May 4, as Jane Jacobs Day.
By 2016, Jane's Walks were taking place in 212 cities in 36 countries, on six continents. The interpretive walks typically apply ideas Jacobs identified or espoused to local areas, which are explored on foot and sometimes by bicycle.
As a tribute to Jacobs, the Rockefeller Foundation, which had awarded grants to Jacobs in the 1950s and 1960s, announced on February 9, 2007, the creation of the Jane Jacobs Medal,
- The significance of sidewalks -
Jacobs frames the sidewalk as a central mechanism in maintaining the order of the city.
America
She became a feature writer for the Office of War Information and then a reporter for Amerika, a publication of the U.S. State Department.
The Jacobs rejected the rapidly growing suburbs as "parasitic", choosing to remain in Greenwich Village. They renovated their house, in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial area, and created a garden in the backyard.
Politics & Beliefs:
"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..."
Architectural Forum
Jacobs left Amerika in 1952 when it announced its relocation to Washington, D.C.
She then found a well-paying job as an associate editor at the Architectural Forum, published by Henry Luce of Time Inc.
After early success in that position, Jacobs began to take assignments on urban planning and "urban blight".
In 1954, she was assigned to cover a development in Philadelphia designed by Edmund Bacon. Although her editors expected a positive story, Jacobs criticized Bacon's project:
When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she determined that "development" seemed to end community life on the street. When Jacobs returned to the offices of Architectural Forum, she began to question the 1950s consensus on urban planning.
In 1955, Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem. Kirk came to the Architectural Forum offices to describe the impact that "revitalization" had on East Harlem, and he introduced Jacobs to the neighborhood.
In 1956, while standing in for Douglas Haskell of Architectural Forum, Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University.
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 photographs of East Harlem.
Rockefeller Foundation & Death and Life of Great American Cities
After reading her Harvard speech, William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write an article 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.
The Fortune article brought Jacobs to the attention of Chadbourne Gilpatric, then associate director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation.
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 result: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
Struggle for Greenwich Village
During the 1950s and 1960s, her home neighborhood (Greenwich Village) was being transformed by city and state efforts to build housing, private developers, the expansion of NYU, and by the urban renewal plans of Robert Moses.
In response, local activist Shirley Hayes created the "Committee to Save Washington Square Park": a coalition of dozens of local neighborhood groups that opposed the roadway extension. Raymond S. Rubinow eventually took over the organization, changing its name to the "Joint Emergency Committee to Close Washington Square to Traffic".
Plans for LOMEX expressway continued despite growing community opposition in areas such as Little Italy. In the 1960s, Jacobs chaired the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway.
Other honors
Jacobs received the second Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum in 2000.
Jacobs is the subject of the 2017 documentary film Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, which depicts her victories over Robert Moses and her philosophy of urban design
1. Safety
Jacobs argued that city sidewalks and people who use sidewalks actively participate in fighting against disorder and preserving civilization.
2. Contact
Sidewalk life permits a range of casual public interactions, from asking for directions and getting advice from the grocer, to nodding hello to passersby and admiring a new dog.
3. Assimilating children
Sidewalks are great places for children to play under the general supervision of parents and other natural proprietors of the street.
Jane Jacobs asserts in her work, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", that the sources of orthodox urbanism are:
Garden Cities of Tomorrow, Ebenezer Howard
The Culture of Cities, Lewis Mumford
Cities in Evolution, Sir Patrick Geddes
Modern Housing, Catherine Bauer
Toward New Towns for America, Clarence Stein
Nothing Gained by Overcrowding, Sir Raymond Unwin
The City of Tomorrow and Its Planning, Le Corbusier
Jacobs advocated the abolition of zoning laws and restoration of free markets in land, which would result in dense, mixed-use neighborhoods and she frequently cited New York City's Greenwich Village as an example of a vibrant urban community.
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.
the needs of city-dwellers.
- The role of parks -
She coined the terms "social capital", "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the street", which were adopted professionally in urban design, sociology, and many other fields.
Jacobs painted a devastating picture of the profession of city planning, labeling it a pseudoscience. This angered the male-dominated urban planning profession.
Jacobs was criticized for her characteristics rather than her position/opinion, calling her a "militant dame" and a "housewife": an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established discipline.
In 1962, she resigned her position at Architectural Forum to become a full-time author and concentrate on raising her children.
In other political activities she became an opponent of the Vietnam War, marched on the Pentagon in October 1967 and criticized the construction of the World Trade Center as a disaster for Manhattan's waterfront.
Robert Caro's biography of Moses, The Power Broker, gives only passing mention to this event, however, despite Jacobs's strong influence on Caro. In 2017, Caro told an interviewer about the difficulty in cutting more than 300,000 words from his initial manuscript: "The section that I wrote on Jane Jacobs disappeared. To this day, when someone says: 'There's hardly a mention of Jane Jacobs,' I think, 'But I wrote a lot about her.' Every time I'm asked about that, I have this sick feeling."
Orthodox urbanism defines parks as "boons conferred on the deprived populations of cities."
Beyond the practical lessons in city design and planning that Death and Life offers, the theoretical underpinnings of the work challenge the modern development mindset. Jane Jacobs defends her positions with common sense and anecdotes.
The fundamental rule of the neighborhood sidewalk also applies to the neighborhood park: "liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life."
Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.
Mrs. Jacobs was a member of the Order of Canada & Order of Ontario.
Gentrification also was caused, however, by "the completely unexpected influx of affluent residents back into the inner city". The extent to which her ideas facilitated this phenomenon was at the time unimaginable. For example, she advocated the preservation of older buildings specifically because their lack of economic value made them affordable for poor people. In this respect, she saw them as "guarantors of social diversity". That many of these older structures have increased in economic value solely due to their age was implausible in 1961. Issues of gentrification have dominated criticism of Jane Jacobs' planning ideas.
Economist Tyler Cowen has criticized her ideas for not addressing problems of scale or infrastructure, and suggests that economists disagree with some of her approaches to development. For example, although her ideas of planning were praised at times as "universal", they are now thought inapplicable when a city grows from one million to ten million (as has happened many times in developing nations). Such arguments suggest that her ideas apply only to cities with similar issues to those of New York, where Jacobs developed many of them.
The planners and developers she fought against to preserve the West Village were among those who initially criticized her ideas. Robert Moses has generally been identified as her arch-rival during this period. Since then, Jacobs' ideas have been analysed many times, often in regard to the outcomes that their influences have produced.
In places such as the West Village, the factors that she argued would maintain economic and cultural diversity have led instead to gentrification and some of the most expensive real estate in the world. Her family's conversion of an old candy shop into a home is an example of the gentrifying trend that would continue under the influence of Jacobs' ideas.
Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from "urban renewal" and "slum clearance", in particular, plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood.
As a woman and a writer who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning, Jacobs endured scorn from established figures. Routinely, she was described first as a housewife, as she did not have a college degree or any formal training in urban planning; as a result, her lack of credentials was seized upon as grounds for criticism, however, the influence of her concepts eventually was acknowledged by highly respected professionals.
She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail.