ancient cities

opportunity to speak at a 1956 Harvard University
conference on urban design. Seizing the offensive,
Jacobs challenged the assumptions of an audience
composed of some of the most influential proponents
of modernist urbanism, including Jose Luis
Sert, Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, and Lewis Mumford.
Mumford encouraged her to obtain a wider audience
for her ideas, and soon thereafter, Fortune
editor William H. Whyte, Jr., commissioned her to
write for his magazine. In an April 1958 article,
“Downtown Is for People,” Jacobs suggested that
planners, architects, and businessmen were working
“at cross-purposes to the city” in ways that
deadened all local flavor and vitality.
Jacobs’s Fortune article was packed with enough
ideas to fill a book, which is what she set about
doing next, courtesy of a grant from the Rockefeller
Foundation. The 1961 publication of Jacobs’s first
book, The Death and Life of Great American
Cities, sparked a firestorm of debate about the
means and ends of the urban renewal program and
of city planning.
The success of that book enabled Jacobs to
devote herself to writing for the next four decades.
Two subsequent books—The Economy of Cities
(1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations
(1984)—explored first the economic and then the
geopolitical functioning of cities. Together with
Death and Life, these constituted a trilogy elaborating
Jacobs’s analysis of urban life. She also
wrote works delving into ethics (Systems of
Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of
Commerce and Politics, 1992), ecology (The
Nature of Economies, 2000), and broad social
criticism (Dark Age Ahead, 2004).
Activism in New York City
Beginning in the mid-1950s, Jacobs joined a number
of public debates in the Greenwich Village
neighborhood where she lived. In 1958, the community
successfully opposed a proposal by Robert
Moses to bisect Washington Square with a sunken
traffic artery. She discussed some of those experiences
in Death and Life, and her observations from
these engagements formed the basis for her ideas
about the nature of politics and power in cities.
Jacobs’s most intense political battles came in response
to the New York City Planning Commission’s
designation of her West Village neighborhood as
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blighted and the target of a 14-block urban renewal
scheme. Leading a citizens’ Committee to Save the
West Village, Jacobs cultivated allies including
Tammany leader Carmine DeSapio as well as
Democratic reformer Ed Koch and the Republican
U.S. Representative John Lindsay. Sustained publicity,
as well as political and legal pressure, induced
Mayor Robert Wagner to withdraw the proposal by
early 1962. Later that same year, Jacobs became the
chair of a committee to fight a proposed expressway
across lower Manhattan. Once again, she proved
herself a strategically and tactically effective
leader, publicly articulating the case against the
highway plan and speaking forcefully at government
hearings.
In the mid-1960s, she devoted sustained energies,
ideas, and organizing resources to bringing
affordable housing to the West Village. The West
Village Association, a community organization
Jacobs cofounded, involved residents in the design
and development of subsidized apartments that
stood in stark contrast to other housing projects
(both public and private). The envisioned West
Village Houses would have entailed no demolition
or tenant relocation, the buildings would have
been oriented toward the street rather than on
superblocks, and the architecture would have
harmonized with the existing neighborhood.
To the association’s frustration, the erection of
the West Village Houses was stymied for nearly a
decade by resistance from city officials, so the
completed buildings fell short of the original projections
for mixed use and amenities. More important
over the long term, Jacobs was unable to find
a suitable response to the erosion of affordable
housing that was undermining the neighborhood
she adored.
Relocation to Toronto
Beginning in 1965, Jacobs became an outspoken
critic of the Vietnam War, contributing her name
to high-profile protests, including a 1967 sit-in at
New York’s Whitehall Street Induction Center,
where she was arrested along with pediatrician
Benjamin Spock, writer Susan Sontag, and others.
Jacobs’s opposition to U.S. foreign policies was so
intense that she cited it as the primary factor in the
decision to move her entire family—including two
draft-age sons—to Canada in 1968.