Jane Jacobs' vision inspired 'livable city' movement

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 Tuesday 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.

The destruction of Boston's West End, an action Mrs. Jacobs decried, and its replacement with Charles River Park might be seen as a textbook case of everything she opposed in urban planning. Conversely, she lauded the North End, whose crowded sidewalks and twisting streets she cited as models for a vigorous, highly livable city neighborhood.

When "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" was published, Lewis Mumford, perhaps America's foremost urban authority, mocked it as "Mother Jacobs' Home Remedies for Urban Cancer," and The Journal of the American Institute of Planners dismissed her as "The Enchanted Ballerina of Hudson Street" (where Mrs. Jacobs then lived, in New York City's Greenwich Village).

What was considered heresy soon became gospel, however. As Stephen Coyle, who headed the Boston Redevelopment Authority from 1984 to 1992, has noted, "People who've never read her work or studied planning speak as if they're students of Jane Jacobs. The whole movement you see in cities - respecting the life and vitalities of neighborhoods, a consciousness of human scale, the constant focus on mixed use in development, and the 24-hour city - all of this comes from her."

Neither theorist nor visionary, Mrs. Jacobs was very much in the American pragmatist tradition, a streetside observer whose preferred modes of urban transit were walking and cycling. Her intellectual method mostly consisted of simply poking around and noticing things, what she once described as "the treasure hunt that began with the streets and one thing leading to another and another ... studying the ecology of cities."

Mrs. Jacobs had a warm, welcoming manner and a rich, chesty laugh. Yet she could prove a formidable adversary. Her opposition to a plan to build a cross-Manhattan expressway through Greenwich Village in the early '60s is widely credited with its defeat.

Mrs. Jacobs, the daughter of John Decker Butzner and Bess Mary (Robison) Butzner, began her study of the ecology of cities in Scranton, Pa., where she was born on May 1, 1916. That coal-mining community provided her a template of "how a city stagnates and declines and may be part of the reason that subject interested me so much," she said in a 1993 Boston Globe interview.

After high school, Mrs. Jacobs moved to New York City. She held down a wide variety of jobs, eventually getting hired as a reporter for a metal-trades paper ("They hired me because I could spell 'molybdenum,"' she recalled).

On the side, she did free-lance work for Vogue and The New York Herald Tribune and took classes at Columbia University.

Other than those classes, Mrs. Jacobs did no academic work after graduating from high school. Nor did she ever have any university affiliation.

"I have a scunner against academic credentialism," Mrs. Jacobs once said, and it could be argued that after the publication of "Death and Life" she was the most important independent intellectual in America.

During World War II, Mrs. Jacobs worked for the Office of War Information and met her future husband, Robert Jacobs Jr., an architect. She became an associate editor of the magazine Architectural Forum in 1952, and in the next decade would try out in its pages many of the ideas that would take final form in "Death and Life."

That book was her most famous, but Mrs. Jacobs believed her second book, "The Economy of Cities" (1969), contained her most important work. In it, she offered everything from a schema for how urban trade may have started 90 centuries ago to an account of the creation of the brassiere industry, and argued for the primacy of cities as both origin and engine of economic health.

Her next book, "The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignties" (1980), might be seen as a departure from her urban concerns. In fact, it could just as well have been called "Montreal vs.

Toronto" and advances such standard Jacobsian principles as economy is destiny and smaller is usually better.

"The Question of Separatism" might also be viewed as a tribute to her new homeland. Mrs. Jacobs was a vehement opponent of the Vietnam War; that, and a job offer in Toronto for her husband, led the Jacobses and their three children to emigrate in the late '60s. She became a Canadian citizen.

In 1984, she published "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" (1984), which may be her most controversial work. It begins with an assault on "the wild, intractable, dismal science of economics" and "its failure to account for the messy, mysterious, deplorably unpredictable behavior of the real world" and goes on to elaborate on her work in "The Economy of Cities."

Her cheerfully unsystematic approach - a magpie assemblage of a news clipping here, a statistic there, a historical analogy on top of them, and some general insight thrown in - may receive its finest expression here.

Mrs. Jacobs also published a children's book, "The Girl on the Hat" (1989). "Systems of Survival" (1993) and "The Nature of Economies" (2000) comprise a series of imaginary dialogues among a group of New Yorkers trying to make sense of how society functions. Her final book, "Dark Age Ahead" (2004), took a gloomy view of things to come.

In 1995, Mrs. Jacobs donated her papers to Boston College, and she often spoke of her affection for this city. "What I liked about it, and still like about it, is it's full of surprises," she said in that 1993 Globe interview. "I like the way things were not evened out, ironed out, in Boston."

In that interview, she also spoke of why cities so appealed to her.

"Cities - how shall I put it? - they're the crux of so many different subjects, so many different puzzles. If you get really interested in them - not necessarily just our ones now, but the ones that have been, too, you get in a very shortcut way into so many other subjects.... There's almost nothing you can think of that cities don't provide some insight into."

Mrs. Jacobs' husband died in 1996. She leaves two sons, James and Edward; a daughter, Mary; and a grandchild.

c.2006 The Boston Globe