The Death and Life of a Great American Woman

Jane Jacobs, whose 1961 book, ”The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” transformed the practice as well as theory of urban renewal in this country, helping to provide the rationale for Quincy Market and other urban restoration projects, died yesterday morning at Toronto Western Hospital, according to her publisher, Random House. She was 89.

Mrs. Jacobs had entered the hospital Saturday, after suffering an apparent stroke.

”She inspired a kind of quiet revolution,” her longtime editor, Jacob Epstein, told the Associated Press. ”Every time you see people rise up and oppose a developer, you think of Jane Jacobs.”
Mrs. Jacobs’ vision of the livable city, with its emphasis on diversity, activity, and human scale, soon became commonplace. Yet at the time ”Death and Life” was published, it seemed both radical and anachronistic.

Where Mrs. Jacobs celebrated sidewalks and pedestrians, city planners in the first two decades after World War II focused on high-rises and expressways. Her love of varied urban textures and human density was anathema to a renewal process dedicated to tearing down old neighborhoods and replacing them with tower blocks uniformly sprouting out of depopulated greenery…” Jane Jacobs, 89; author’s vision inspired ‘livable city’ movement by Mark Feeney, Boston Globe, April 26, 2006.