![]() She said “yes” to preserving historic buildings and encouraging diverse small businesses, and to rehabilitating abandoned port areas for new uses: parks, aquariums, maritime museums, and harbor tours that could attract tourists and city residents. Instead, she supported fine-grained, locally designed, grassroots solutions. She battled giant-scale, centrally planned responses to city problems, saying “no” to multi-lane commuter highways that would bisect existing neighborhoods and parks, and “no” to public-housing towers that bred gangs. ![]() Throughout her long career as a journalist and activist, first in Manhattan and then Toronto, she bitterly criticized city officials for destructive “urban-renewal” projects. Jane Jacobs was a scathing adversary of that kind of short-term thinking. “You’re obsolete,” planners said, and razed them, scattering residents to the winds. In the decades after World War II, city planners became impatient with aging, sagging neighborhoods. What makes a place resilient? Can it rise again after people and jobs have moved away? Can it attract new people and businesses to circulate life and energy? ![]() In her celebrated first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, she asked questions that continue to absorb us today. Jane Jacobs was one of the great observers of urban life, a scholar of shopkeepers and sidewalk characters, of city parks and neighborhood factories. In the enduring words of Yogi Berra: “You can observe a lot just by watching.” ![]()
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