Jane Jacobs
Jane Isabel Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.
Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from urban renewal and slum clearance, in particular plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through the area of Manhattan that would later become known as SoHo, as well as part of Little Italy and Chinatown. She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project. After moving to Toronto in 1968, she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto that were planned and under construction.
Jacobs was often criticized as a woman and a writer who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning. Routinely, she was described first as a housewife, as she did not have a college degree or any formal training in urban planning; as a result, her lack of credentials was seized upon as grounds for criticism. The influence of her concepts eventually was acknowledged by highly respected professionals, such as Richard Florida and Robert Lucas.
Early years
Jane Isabel Jacobs was born Jane Isabel Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Bess Robison Butzner, a former teacher and nurse, and John Decker Butzner, a physician. They were a Protestant family. Her brother, John Decker Butzner Jr., served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. After graduation from Scranton High School, she worked for a year as the unpaid assistant to the women's page editor at the Scranton Tribune.New York City
In 1935, during the Great Depression, she moved to New York City with her sister Betty. Jane Butzner took an immediate liking to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, which deviated some from the city's grid structure. The sisters soon moved there from Brooklyn.During her early years in Manhattan, Jacobs held a variety of jobs working as a stenographer and freelance writer, writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she later said, "gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like". Her first job was for a trade magazine, as a secretary, then an editor. She sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue.
She studied at Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. About the freedom to pursue study across her wide-ranging interests, she said:
For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high-school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education.
Career
After attending Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, Butzner found a job at Iron Age magazine. Her 1943 article on economic decline in Scranton was well publicized and led the Murray Corporation of America to locate a warplane factory there. Encouraged by this success, Butzner petitioned the War Production Board to support more operations in Scranton. Experiencing job discrimination at Iron Age, she also advocated for equal pay for women and for the right of workers to unionize.''Amerika''
She became a feature writer for the Office of War Information and then a reporter for Amerika, a publication of the US State Department in the Russian language. While working there she met Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., a Columbia-educated architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman. They married in 1944. Together they had a daughter, Burgin, and two sons, James and Ned. They bought a three-story building at 555 Hudson Street. Jane continued to write for Amerika after the war, while Robert left Grumman and resumed work as an architect. The Jacobses rejected the rapidly growing suburbs as "parasitic", choosing to remain in Greenwich Village. They renovated their house, in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial area, and created a garden in the backyard.Working for the State Department during the McCarthy era, Jacobs received a questionnaire about her political beliefs and loyalties. Jacobs was anti-communist and had left the Federal Workers Union because of its apparent communist sympathies. Nevertheless, she was pro-union and purportedly appreciated the writing of Saul Alinsky, and therefore she was under suspicion. On 25 March 1952, Jacobs delivered her response to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board at the US Department of State. In her foreword to her answer, she said:
The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe.
''Architectural Forum''
Jacobs left Amerika in 1952 when it announced its relocation to Washington, DC. She then found a well-paying job at Architectural Forum, published by Henry Luce of Time Inc. She was hired as an associate editor. After early success in that position, Jacobs began to take assignments on urban planning and "urban blight". In 1954, she was assigned to cover the Society Hill development designed by Edmund Bacon. Although her editors expected a positive story, Jacobs criticized Bacon's project, reacting against its lack of concern for the poor African Americans who were directly affected. When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she determined that "development" seemed to end community life on the street. When Jacobs returned to the offices of Architectural Forum, she began to question the 1950s consensus on urban planning.In 1955, Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem. Kirk came to the Architectural Forum offices to describe the impact that "revitalization" had on East Harlem, and he introduced Jacobs to the neighborhood.
In 1956, while standing in for Douglas Haskell of Architectural Forum, Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University. She addressed leading architects, urban planners, and intellectuals, speaking on the topic of East Harlem. She urged this audience to "respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order". Contrary to her expectations, the talk was received with enthusiasm, but it also marked her as a threat to established urban planners, real estate owners, and developers. Architectural Forum printed the speech that year, along with photographs of East Harlem.
Rockefeller Foundation and ''Death and Life of Great American Cities''
After reading her Harvard speech, William H. Whyte invited Jacobs to write an article for Fortune magazine. The resulting piece, "Downtown Is for People", appeared in a 1958 issue of Fortune, and marked her first public criticism of Robert Moses. Her criticism of the Lincoln Center was not popular with supporters of urban renewal at Architectural Forum and Fortune. C. D. Jackson, the publisher of Fortune, was outraged and over the telephone, demanded of Whyte: "Who is this crazy dame?"The Fortune article brought Jacobs to the attention of Chadbourne Gilpatric, then associate director of the Humanities Division at the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation had moved aggressively into urban topics, with a recent award to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for studies of urban aesthetics that would culminate in the publication of Kevin A. Lynch's Image of the City. In May 1958, Gilpatric invited Jacobs to begin serving as a reviewer for grant proposals. Later that year, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant to Jacobs to produce a critical study of city planning and urban life in the US. Gilpatric encouraged Jacobs to "explor the field of urban design to look for ideas and actions which may improve thinking on how the design of cities might better serve urban life, including cultural and humane value." Affiliating with The New School, she spent three years conducting research and writing drafts. In 1961, Random House published the result: The Death and Life of Great American Cities.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities remains one of the most influential books in the history of American city planning. She coined the terms "mixed primary uses", and "eyes on the street", which were adopted professionally in urban design, sociology, and many other fields. Jacobs painted a devastating picture of the profession of city planning, labeling it a pseudoscience. This angered the male-dominated urban planning profession. Jacobs was criticized with ad hominem attacks, being called a "militant dame" and a "housewife": an amateur who had no right to interfere with an established discipline. One planner dismissed Jacobs's book as "bitter coffee-house rambling". Robert Moses, sent a copy, called it "intemperate and also libelous ... Sell this junk to someone else."
Later, her book was criticized from the left for leaving out race and openly endorsing gentrification, which Jacobs referred to as "unslumming".
In 1962, she resigned her position at Architectural Forum to become a full-time author and concentrate on raising her children. In other political activities she became an opponent of the Vietnam War, marched on the Pentagon in October 1967, and criticized the construction of the World Trade Center as a disaster for Manhattan's waterfront.