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On Jane Jacobs (2017)

The legend of Jane Jacobs centers on the writer who revolutionized our thinking about cities with her now-classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and the fearless activist who ...

Jacobs’ understandable hostility to Corbusian tower-in-the-park schemes extended to Stuyvesant Town, a private development for lower-middle-class and middle class occupants which she singled out for attack in her Harvard talk, but which has since grown into an accepted, useful, even cherished part of the Manhattan streetscape. She also dismissed sociologists as a whole: “They just do busy work.” The way her admiring biographer Kanigel summarizes it is that hers was “the independent mind in conflict with received wisdom.” The upside of this approach is that it challenges guild pieties with fresh, sometimes brilliant insights; the downside is that, in sidestepping the traditional knowledge a profession has amassed, an autodidact may be condemned to sounding touchily defensive, like an amateur. In 1968, tired of battling New York planners, disenchanted with America’s Vietnam War and eager to protect her sons from the draft, she moved her family to Toronto, which she regarded as “the most healthy and hopeful city in North America.” There she continued to fight against highways or large developments, and to write her other books, approaching urban ecology from different angles.

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