'Cities' Author Jane Jacobs Dies at 89

Updated 4:33 PM ET April 25, 2006

By HILLEL ITALIE

NEW YORK (AP) - Jane Jacobs, an author and community activist of singular 
influence whose classic "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" 
transformed ideas about urban planning, died Tuesday, her publisher said. 
Jacobs, a longtime resident of Toronto, was 89.

Jacobs died in her sleep Tuesday morning at a Toronto hospital, which she 
entered a few days ago, according to Random House publicist Sally Marvin. 
Jacobs' son, James, was with her at the time. The author, who would have 
turned 90 on May 4, had been in poor health.

A native of Scranton, Pa., Jacobs lived for many years in New York before 
moving to Toronto in the late 1960s. She and her husband, architect Robert 
Jacobs Jr., were unhappy that their taxes supported the Vietnam War and 
turned to Canada as their permanent home. Robert Jacobs died in 1996.

Jacobs, who based her findings on deep, eclectic reading and firsthand 
observation, challenged assumptions she believed damaged modern cities _ 
that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other, that an empty street 
was safer than a crowded one, that the car represented progress over the 
pedestrian.

Her priorities were for integrated, manageable communities, for diversity of 
people, transportation, architecture and commerce. She also believed that 
economies need to be self-sustaining and self-renewing, relying on local 
initiative instead of centralized bureaucracies.

"She inspired a kind of quiet revolution," her longtime editor, Jacob 
Epstein, said Tuesday. "Every time you see people rise up and oppose a 
developer, you think of Jane Jacobs."

"Death and Life," published in 1961, evolved from opposing the standards of 
the time to becoming a standard itself. It was taught in urban studies 
classes throughout North America and sold more than half a million copies. 
City planners in New York and Toronto were among those who cited its 
importance and her book became an essential text for "New Urban" communities 
such as Hercules, Calif., and Civano, Ariz.

Jacobs also received a number of prizes, including a lifetime achievement 
award in 2000 from the National Building Foundation in Washington, D.C.

With her bangs and owlish glasses, and her look of cheerful curiosity, it 
was easy to mistake Jacobs for an idle eccentric, the kind of woman to be 
found late at night in the research room of the public library.

But Jacobs was a dedicated, even iconic activist. In the 1950s, her loyalty 
was questioned by the U.S. government, and in the 1960s, she was arrested 
for protesting Vietnam. She successfully opposed a Toronto highway project 
not long after moving there and was a distinctive presence at public 
hearings.

"You sort of fell in love with Jane when you met her," Epstein said. "She 
was exuberant, original, strong-minded and a very kind woman."

Her most famous confrontation came in the early '60s, when she helped defeat 
a plan by New York City park commissioner Robert Moses to build an 
expressway through Washington Square. During a 2000 interview with The 
Associated Press, Jacobs recalled the city hearing where she first laid eyes 
on the mighty Moses.

"He was one of the first speakers," she said. "He was furious and he stood 
up there, inside the railed enclosure, and not where most speakers spoke _ 
outside where the public microphone was. He was privileged.

"He gripped this railing and he said, in dismissing scornfully our plan to 
have no more than the existing road and better not even that, he said, 
'These protests are just by a bunch of ... a bunch of mothers!'"

Robert Caro, whose classic biography of Moses, "The Power Broker," was often 
taught alongside "Death and Life," said Tuesday that Jacobs was a 
"far-sighted genius who guided cities in new directions." He called her 
battle with Moses "one of the truly heroic sagas in the history of New 
York."

Jacobs, born in 1916, was a doctor's daughter with a compulsion to question 
authority and find answers for herself. During the Depression, on days when 
job hunts went nowhere, she would invest a nickel in the subway and explore 
a neighborhood: the diamond district, the garment district, the meatpacking 
district. Soon, she made money out of her passion, writing articles for 
various magazines.

"Death and Life" emerged from her reporting. Not only did it attack 
canonical beliefs in city planning, it attacked such canonical figures as 
Moses, for his dogmatic attachment to the automobile, and historian Lewis 
Mumford, author of "The Culture of Cities," for his misguided attachment to 
the anti-city philosophy.

Jacobs thought cities suffered from an anti-city bias among planners, the 
romanticization of a more rural way of life. Because of this, she wrote, 
vital communities were being torn down simply because they were "crowded," 
other neighborhoods were fatally isolated and parks were being constructed 
without regard to their surrounding environment.

In later works, she examined the ideas outlined in "Death and Life" from 
other perspectives: "Cities and the Wealth of Nations," the economy; 
"Systems of Survival," morals; "The Nature of Economies," science and 
ecology. Her final book was "Dark Age Ahead" in 2004.

Jacobs is survived by three children, James, Edward and Mary.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may 
not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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