Happy Birthday Jane Jacobs

Today would have been social activist and urban writer Jane Jacob‘s 98th birthday. Throughout her career, she fought against corporate globalization and urged urban planners and developers to remember the importance of community and the human scale. Despite not having any formal training, she radically changed urban planning policy through the power of observation and personal experience. Her theories on how design can affect community and creativity continue to hold relevance today - influencing everything from the design of mega-cities to tiny office spaces. She passed away in 2006.

In The Life and Death of Great American Cities, her most well-known publication, Jacobs critiques the short-sightedness of urban planners in the 1950s and argues that their assumptions about what makes a good city are actually detrimental to the human experience. For example, she contends that the creation of automobile infrastructure results in the unnatural division of pre-existing neighbourhoods, creating unsafe environments and thereby severing community connections. In the years leading up to her death, she discussed ways in which communities could recover what they lost as a result of poor foresight in earlier city planning efforts.

After her first novel, Jacobs broadened her scope and began to look at topics such as economics, morals, and social relations. Here is a complete list of her publications:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities
• The Economy of Cities
• The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle Over Sovereignty
• Cities and the Wealth of Nations
• Systems of Survival
• The Nature of Economies
• Dark Age Ahead