Remembering Jane Jacobs

[tags]jane jacobs, urban planning[/tags]

 
Credit: Wikipedia

It was a year ago today that Jane Jacobs, a community activist who unintentionally became an authority on urban planning and even anthropologist of cities, passed away in her adopted home of Toronto.

She rose to prominence by fighting a proposed expressway in Manhattan, New York. She was never a professional planner, but studied a variety of courses in her life and brought them to her theories on the social and economic origins and roles of cities. Her closeness to communities, and in turn cities, led her to theorize later on the economics of cities. She had also argued that cities were able to grow and thrive based on “import replacement,” adding productive value to goods and services and spawning alternative value-added markets. She went as far as to say that cities, not nations, are the sources of economic wealth.

Jacobs’s Wikipedia entry contains links to interviews she gave and synopses of some books she has authored. She has 659,000 entries when her name is entered on Google. She’s granted several interviews, and her thoughts have made it impossible for any political movement to label Jacobs as their own. Her insights are nothing short of fascinating.