Jane Jacobs (1916-2006)

I learned from Craig over at NorthCoastUS.com that Jane Jacobs has died. Here's Craig's post. Fans of Janes have edited and expanded the Wikipedia entry about her life and work, over here. I recently posted this about about her influence.

Two of Buffalo NY's most astute observers of things urban, Tim Tielman and Hank Bromley, spoke with Jane Jacobs in Toronto back in July, 2000. Here's the full-text of their interview.

HB: I thought I’d start by asking how you started writing about cities and what makes them work.

JJ: Well, I really explain all that in the Introduction to The Death and Life of Great American Cities.In brief, I was working for an architectural magazine, and I becamedismayed at how unrealistic the plans that I was writing about were. Isaw that they didn’t really make very magnetic or attractive cityareas; people seemed to shun them instead of enjoying them. And then Iwas fortunate in having a good mentor who had been thinking about thesame things, the head worker of a settlement in East Harlem. And he gotme thinking along the lines of how city streets work.

HB: In ways that professional planners hadn’t really been considering?

JJ: No, they didn’t like the street....read the rest....

Update...
tuesday evening

Jane's New York Times obituary...

From the Ludwig von Mies Institute...

Jane Jacobs (born 1916), author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died today. Obituaries will invariably describe her views in a way that suggest she made a case against market economics. But Rothbard described her book as "a brilliant, scintillating work celebrating the primacy for economic development, past and present, of free-market cities. Read the rest...

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