Toronto Globe and Mail - Jane Jacobs - Obituary

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JANE JACOBS, WRITER, URBAN PLANNER, ACTIVIST: 1916-2006
Cities, she said, work from the sidewalk up

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

SANDRA MARTIN

As a public speaker she was feisty, as a citizen she helped bring the Spadina Expressway to a screeching halt, but what most people will remember about Jane Jacobs is the way she thought about the world. Largely self-educated, she was an acute observer of the complexity of life. She loved to walk the streets, storing information and insights in her prodigious brain, facts and incidents that she would then analyze, seeking patterns to explain why some neighbourhoods flourished and others declined. From the small and the concrete, she worked upward and outward, producing a complex web of ideas about nature, economics and human behaviour.

A free thinker, who loathed the modern tendency to credentialism, she took on the rigid concepts of post-war urban philosophers in her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. "I studied city planning, and when I read her book all of my city planning was turned upside down because she looked at it from a different angle -- from the angle of the human being," said architect Eberhard Zeidler. "It changed my architecture because I started to think of architecture -- no matter if you design a hospital or a factory or a house -- not as a thing you do, but as a thing you do for people."

Although born and raised in the United States, she came to Canada with her late husband, architect Robert (Bob) Jacobs, in 1969 because they had two sons approaching draft age and they were opposed to the Vietnam War. "I knew her work before I knew her," said David Crombie, former mayor of Toronto. In thinking beyond the activism that people associate with Jane Jacobs, Mr. Crombie credits her with three major achievements. She convinced Toronto activists, like him, that their ideas were important, that it was essential to act on them, and she presented them with a personal model of an ethical thinker.

"She was completely original," said Jason Epstein the legendary Random House editor who worked on most of her books. He believes later books, such as The Economy of Cities and Cities and the Wealth of Nations, are just as important as Death, and he predicts they will eventually become part of the mainstream.

Instead of arguing from empirical experience from "the fact of living in the city and seeing what is happening," she was "arguing theoretically about the origins of cities and their effect on economies."

Pointing out that Ms. Jacobs "saw something academic economists hadn't seen because they get so caught up in other people's abstractions that they can't see what is really happening," he described her as "a genius" of common sense. "She had 20/20 vision for reality."

Having Jane Jacobs as a mother was fascinating, interesting and an incredible privilege, her son Ned Jacobs said from Vancouver. "I've known that all my life, but it just gets deeper and deeper," he said. "She had no pretence because she had personal, moral and intellectual integrity. She could not abide lies and ignorance."

Because she had "a driving desire to understand how things work," she "didn't have time to be a celebrity; she just had time to do her work," he said. "And she would have continued to do her work if she had been able to live longer, but old age caught up with her," he said. "Basically her body wore out."

Jane Butzner was one of four children of John Decker Butzner, a doctor, and Bess Mary Butzner (nee Robison) a teacher and a nurse. An independent, curious child and an avid reader, she took great advantage of the riches to be found in the local reference library, the museum of natural history and the zoo. By the time she had completed high school, she was "thoroughly sick of attending school and eager to get a job."

She worked as a reporter for The Scranton Tribune before moving to New York to live with her older sister in the early 1930s. Jobs were scarce during the Depression and she scrambled to find short-term secretarial work. Between assignments, she wrote four articles about working districts of the city which she sold to Vogue -- her first real literary sale.

Her parents wanted her to go to university so she went to the School of General Studies at Columbia for two years, but left after she ran afoul of university required courses for completing a degree. And so she continued her own idiosyncratic process of self-education by reading, observing, wondering, thinking and trying to assemble her thoughts in a coherent piece of writing.

To support herself, she worked in magazines and as a feature writer for the Office of War Information. She met her husband, architect Robert (Bob) Hyde Jacobs (who was working at the same defence plant as her sister) when her sister invited him to a party in the apartment the two young women shared.

"I walked in the door," Bob Jacobs said later, "and there she was, in a beautiful, green woollen evening dress, and I fell in love. It took me a little longer to convince her." Four months after they met in March of 1944, they were married.

After peace came, she found a job at Architectural Forum, a journal that she read frequently because her husband was a subscriber. It never occurred to her to stay home and be a full-time wife and mother, after her children James Kedzie (April, 1948), Edward (Ned) Drecker (June, 1952), and Mary (Burgin) Hyde (January, 1955) were born. "I grew up with the idea I could do anything. Nothing was going to be barred from me if I wanted," she said later.

Eventually, she was assigned stories on city planning and rebuilding and was stunned to discover that "city planning had nothing to do with how cities worked successfully in real life." After writing an article on downtowns for Fortune magazine, the Rockefeller Foundation asked her if she had any other ideas about cities. She did, envisaging, "writing a series of articles, which might be a book, of about 10 chapters, mostly about city streets, and that it would take me a year."

It took more than two years and two grants from the Rockefeller Foundation to complete The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that has never been out of print.

She was challenging not simply the mistakes she saw around her, but the very idea that an urban utopia could be designed. Her argument was that cities work from the sidewalk up, that they grow organically in a self-organizing mix of commerce and domesticity. Zoning by function -- a prime example being the razing of neighbourhoods to build isolated public housing projects -- deprived whole areas of the human interactive oxygen they need to survive as dynamic entities.

Many urban planners and architectural writers were aghast, but the book found a receptive audience. Partly, it was the writing, which was clear, concise and jargon free. Partly, it was the argument, which moved from the concrete -- a city sidewalk -- to the abstract. Partly, it was the fact that her book connected with a generation of young adults who were trying to make sense of the post-war world.

Death and Life is often linked to a series of other epochal works that were written in the early 1960s by passionate inquisitors of the world around them; books such as Growing up Absurd by Paul Goodman (1960), The Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962), The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (1963), Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan (1964) and Unsafe at any Speed by Ralph Nader (1963).

She was barely back from book leave when the city of New York decided to appropriate her neighbourhood for urban renewal -- a case study of "the intellectual idiocies and ignorance of city workings that I had been writing about." She protested along with her neighbours and was made chairman of the Committee to Save the West Village. The journalist and critic had been transformed into an activist.

About this time, the Vietnam War was coming to a full boil on many American campuses. Ms. Jacobs joined an anti-Vietnam protest march on the Pentagon in 1967 and found herself smack up against a row of soldiers in gas masks. "They looked like some big horrible insect, the whole bunch of them together, not human beings at all. And I was also not only appalled at how they looked, but I was outraged that they should be marching on me, an American," she said later in an interview with The Boston Globe, explaining her decision to move to Toronto with her family in 1968.

Mr. Jacobs, a hospital architect, found work with architect Eb Zeidler, a friend and colleague. They moved into the Annex area of Toronto and soon established themselves in a house on Albany Avenue. After Mr. Jacobs died in 1996, Ms. Jacobs lived on there alone continuing to write her books and respond to calls to engage in neighbourhood and city protests.

Ms. Jacobs was still unpacking from the move to Toronto when she found new foes to combat with the radical activism she had learned on the streets of New York City: developers who wanted to tear down historic properties to erect high rises, and politicians who wanted to build expressways to bring cars from the suburbs into the downtown core.

"The most memorable first meeting that I remember," said former Toronto Mayor John Sewell "was during the demonstration to save houses at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne in early 1973."

The developers had put hoarding up around the buildings and were about to tear down a porch. Ms. Jacobs ordered Mr. Sewell, then a city alderman, to rip down the hoarding because she knew that it was against the law to demolish a building unless there was a hoarding surrounding it. He said, "I can't." She said, "you must." And it was done. "And that," said Mr. Sewell led to the city's first non-profit housing project."

Urban planner Joe Berridge, who arrived in Toronto as a graduate student in 1969, met her carrying a placard protesting the Spadina Expressway. He was stunned not only that this woman, whose work, he had read and admired, lived in Toronto, but that she had taken such a public role. When asked about her legacy in a telephone conversation from Sweden, Mr. Berridge recited the memorial to the architect Sir Christopher Wren in St. Paul's Cathedral in London: "Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice" [Reader, if you seek a memorial, look around you.]

She was really two personalities, said Mr. Zeidler, the powerful ferocious intellect who talked about issues and the human being who was "the sweetest person I ever met." Another person who knew the private Jane Jacobs was journalist Sid Adilman, who has been a neighbour, a friend and a member of her "outer family" for 35 years.

"For all of her public celebrity, which she used when she thought re-development was ill-advised, she kept her private life on another plane," said Mr. Adilman. She did not suffer fools, and journalists quickly learned that lazy or dumb questions were dismissed with a look or a curt response. Mr. Adilman remembers being at a magic show with Ms. Jacobs, when a "stuffy arts board person" said "I haven't read your latest book yet." "That's okay," retorted Ms. Jacobs, "I haven't finished writing it yet."

No matter how frail Ms. Jacobs became in recent years, many people thought of her as indestructible and remembered that her mother had lived past 100. "I thought she would be with us forever," said her Canadian editor Anne Collins, who worked with Ms. Jacobs on The Nature of Economies and Dark Age Ahead and had recently signed her to write two more books, a short history of the human race and an anthology of her thinking about economics.

Her family issued a simple statement yesterday afternoon: "What's important is not that she died but that she lived, and that her life's work has greatly influenced the way we think. Please remember her by reading her books and implementing her ideas." And if you don't, Ned Jacobs joked, "there's a Dark Age Ahead."

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BOOKS BY JANE JACOBS

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

The Economy of Cities (1968)

The Question of Separatism (1980)

Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984)

Systems of Survival (1993)

The Nature of Economies (2000)

Dark Age Ahead (2004)

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Jane Jacobs was born in Scranton, Penn., on May 14, 1916. She died in Toronto yesterday after being in ill health for some months. She was 89. Predeceased by her husband, architect Robert (Bob) Jacobs, she is survived by two sons, James and Ned, a daughter Burgin, two grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and her brother James Butzner.

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