Jane Jacobs

1916 - 2006

Jane Butzner was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania in a town centered around coal mining. Her parents were both successful, her father was a doctor and her mother was a teacher and nurse. After graduating High School, Jane went to work at the Scranton Newspaper, as an unpaid assistant to the women’s page editor. One year later, in the middle of the Great Depression, Jane left Scranton for New York City and worked as a stenographer and freelance writer. Working in the city gave Jane a new perspective on city planning. A few years later, Jane met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs while working for the Office of War Information.

In 1952, Jane earned the position as the associate editor of Architectural Forum, allowing her to study urban renewal and city planning. In a speech she gave at Harvard in 1956, Jane spoke about the issues behind conventional planning theory and practice and how many of the cities’ rebuilding projects were not safe or economically sound. After the speech, William H. Whyte inspired Jane to write an article for Fortune magazine called Downtown is for People. In the 1960s, Jane became a bright light in urban activism leading local efforts to stop neighborhood clearing and highway building proposed by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert Moses. In 1962, Jane became the chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway in reaction to Mose’s plan to build a highway through West Village and Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. During a public demonstration in 1968 to try to stop the highway from being built, Jane was arrested. This was a turning point in the development of New York City.

Published in 1961, her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities highlighted revolutionary ideas about how cities function, grow and fail. Jane saw cities in a different light compared to most people. She was able to write about sidewalks, parks, retail design, and organization in great detail. Jane helped shift focus from car-centered means of transportation to helping local communities stop the expansion of roads and expressways. Despite her expertise, Jane had no professional training. She never called herself a ‘planner’, instead she relied solely on her observations and common sense.