a city reader

Jane’s Addiction

Jane Jacobs’ brilliant life-long defense of neighborhood life

You’ve heard about her 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities for so long you think you’ve read it. The New York Review of Books called it ‘Perhaps the most influential work in the history of town planning…a work of literature.’

Jacobs came from Scranton to New York. She lived in and wrote about Greenwich Village. She thought about what made neighborhoods work and what things killed them. She fought powerful intrusive highway plans. She eventually moved to Toronto so her sons wouldn’t have to go to Vietnam. She wrote more and thought more and was seen as a saint of city life till the end.