Toronto Globe and Mail - Jane Jacobs - News Story

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Tributes pour in for thinker, planner and activist Jacobs
Author of hugely influential 1961 work dies nine days before her 90th birthday

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

JEFF GRAY AND HAYLEY MICK

TORONTO -- Tributes to Jane Jacobs, who turned 20th-century conventional thinking about North American cities on its head, came yesterday from politicians, urban planners, economists and activists across the continent.

The activist and author of the hugely influential 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died in a Toronto hospital yesterday, nine days before her 90th birthday.

The U.S.-born, long-time resident of Toronto was a friend, adviser and mentor to Mayor David Miller, who interrupted city council proceedings yesterday to announce her death, and later led councillors in a moment of silence.

He praised her, in a resolution passed by council, as "one of the great urban thinkers and activists of this or any other time," and said her "legacy is embedded in the fabric and function of our city."

Mr. Miller said Ms. Jacobs -- whose 2005 work, Dark Age Ahead, last year won the Writers' Trust of Canada Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing -- was working on another book almost right up to her death.

"She treasured Toronto, and Toronto treasured her. And literally, and figuratively, Jane Jacobs wrote the book on modern city-building," Mr. Miller said, pointing to her belief in vibrant "mixed-use" downtown neighbourhoods and her opposition to the neighbourhood-killing Spadina Expressway in the late 1960s.

Former Toronto mayor David Crombie, an ally of Ms. Jacobs in that fight and others, said not even he was spared from her activism.

Once, Ms. Jacobs brought a demonstrating crowd in favour of an infill housing development right to Mr. Crombie's front door at 11 p.m., rousing the mayor from his bed.

"She was not above wagging her finger at me and telling me that, yes, I was going to Jerusalem, but I'd better hurry."

Her influence reverberated in the field of economics as well, despite her lack of formal academic training.

Robert Lucas, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago and long an admirer of Ms. Jacobs's work, praised her yesterday in an interview as a "natural-born social scientist, for sure."

"She thought deeply about how human societies work, and what forces lead to prosperity and what don't," Prof. Lucas said.

Harvard University economics professor Edward Glaeser, co-author of a paper in 1992 that tested and supported Ms. Jacobs's theories about how the industrial diversity in cities drives economic growth, called her the greatest urbanist of the past century.

"There is no more creative innovative scholar that has been thinking about cities. . . . She is in a class by herself."

Former prime minister Paul Martin, who met with Ms. Jacobs both as prime minister and as finance minister, said she "never minced words."

"She was a tremendous woman and she had tremendous insight," Mr. Martin said.

"I think that she's influenced almost anyone who's thought about cities and the importance of cities in recent decades."

Federal NDP Leader Jack Layton and NDP MP Olivia Chow once lived just down the street from Ms. Jacobs in the Annex in Toronto.

"She was an icon," Mr. Layton said.

"Few individuals become a part of the intellectual iconography of a city, and of a nation. And she certainly has achieved that status."

Larry Beasley, city planner for the City of Vancouver, vividly remembers when Ms. Jacobs visited his city in the winter of 2002.

"It was like meeting the most important person in the development of your own theory," he said. "To me, it must have been like a scientist meeting Einstein."

He and others from the planning department took Ms. Jacobs on a tour, pointing out what they felt were the most important elements of the city. But it was a small playground filled with children in the city's core that caught her eye.

She made them stop the car so she could leap out and have her photo taken in front of it.

"She said, 'This is the city of the future,' " he recalled. "And we were thrilled."

Prominent Toronto architect Jack Diamond remembered Ms. Jacobs as a feisty spirit who believed in the insights of everyday people before those of political leaders and "so-called experts."

"She really was a true democrat," he said. "She really believed that people knew best."

Glen Murray, a close friend of Ms. Jacobs who first worked with her when he was the mayor of Winnipeg, said she was "flat-out clear about her objectives, and she had a surgically accurate analysis of things. Even in the last couple years of her life, she didn't lose any of that clarity."

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