*
The Fort Wayne News-Sentinel
"Jesus' crucifixion was one of many carried out for state reasons"
BY HELEN T. GRAY
Knight Ridder Newspapers
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - (KRT) - Crucifixion: The act of putting to death by nailing or binding the hands and feet to a cross.
This brutal method of execution that has become synonymous with torture is the centerpiece of ``The Passion of the Christ," Mel Gibson's movie about the last 12 hours of Jesus' life.
One Jewish anthropologist called crucifixion "one of the cruelest and most humiliating forms of punishment in the ancient world."
While Jesus of Nazareth is the most famous person to be crucified, he is far from the only one. Historians say that from about the sixth century B.C.E., crucifixion was a method of execution among the Medes, Persians and Seleucids of the eastern Mediterranean; Carthaginians, who settled in northern Africa; and Romans.
"Crucifixion was an extreme punishment used by peoples around the Mediterranean basin for about 1,000 years," said David Cook, assistant professor of religious studies at Rice University. "It was a public and ... degrading punishment designed to deter."
He said it was first mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi about 1700 B.C.E. but brought into popular use about 500 B.C.E. by the Persians and then the Carthaginians. In the fourth century B.C.E., Alexander the Great is believed to have spread the use of crucifixion to Egypt. The Romans are believed to have picked it up from the Carthaginians.
"There is very little description of crucifixion in ancient literature, partly because it was such a horrible, distasteful process," said James Mahon, a specialist in the sociology of religion at William Paterson University in New Jersey. "In the ancient world, people didn't talk about crucifixion because it was such a debasing act and limited to the lowest classes.
"The Greek historian Herodotus reports crucifixion as being used by the Medes and the Persians. He seems to suggest that the Persians were the first ones to use it on a large scale. There was an interaction between the Greeks and the Persians, and it appears that with Alexander the Great's spread in the fourth century that crucifixion became a common Hellenistic practice."
Alexander the Great is said to have had 2,000 survivors from the siege of Tyre crucified on the shores of the Mediterranean, wrote Joe Zias, formerly of the Israel Antiquities Authority. In addition, he said, from 37 to 41 C.E. Jews were tortured and crucified in an amphitheater to entertain the inhabitants of Alexandria.
As a method of execution, he said, crucifixion was rare among Jews, and, except for a few instances, those to be killed were stoned to death first and then hung on a tree. One notable exception was when 800 Pharisees were crucified in Jerusalem in 267 B.C.E.
In the Roman Empire, historians say, crucifixion was applied to the lower classes, mainly slaves and foreigners. It also was used in response to any actions that were seen as threatening to the empire, such as political agitation, piracy and slave revolts. These would be considered capital offenses.
In the case of Jesus, Mahon said, the sign above him on the cross that he was "King of the Jews" was a claim the Romans would consider treason and punishable by crucifixion.
"The way the legal system was organized in Syria in the early first century was that the Jews themselves administered their civil affairs, but with issues that may involve a death penalty, those matters were relegated to the Roman governor of Syria," he said. "During this time, Pontius Pilate was the procurator, or administrative representative of the empire, in Judea."
The Romans crucified large numbers of Jews, who were seen as a troublesome and rebellious group, so one such as Jesus probably was no different, Cook said.
The instruments of crucifixion were varied, not always resembling the familiar cross in many depictions of Jesus' crucifixion.
"It could be a stake in the ground, and the arms (of victims) were extended above them," Mahon said. "Another variation is that sometimes people could be crucified upside down. Another type of cross is one that looks like an `X,' with the (person's) arms and legs spread out.
"Another variation was the crossbeam would be set on top of the upright beam, and the arms would be raised and attached to this crossbeam. And the one we are most familiar with is the elongated plus sign, the typical representation of the one used for Jesus."
The usual method of crucifixion was to either nail or tie a person's arms lengthwise to a crossbeam, which was hoisted upon a stake driven into the ground to a height of about nine to 12 feet, Cook said. Other variations included lowering the level of the crossbeam, which would leave the person exposed to attacks by wild animals or sometimes providing a small support at the buttocks, which would cause the person to die more slowly.
Scourging, or whipping, was not necessarily a part of crucifixion, but it seems that it often was. The severity of the scourging played a part in determining how long it would take someone to die after being crucified, Mahon said. After the scourging, the victim would carry the crossbeam, not the entire cross, to the place of crucifixion.
The intent was obvious, said Paul B. Harvey Jr. of the Classics, Ancient Mediterranean Studies, History and Religious Studies Program at Pennsylvania State University. It was to be a "spectacular, theatrical, public capital punishment."
"It was meant not only to be a deterrent," Harvey said, "but to demonstrate the power of the state and for public entertainment."
Deterrence was a factor when the Romans crucified 6,000 slaves who had participated in the slave revolt of 73 B.C.E. led by Spartacus, Mahon said. The stakes were strung for miles along a Roman highway for all to see.
As a further deterrent in the ancient world, many victims were crucified where the criminal act took place, Zias said. For instance, thieves would be crucified along the cities' busiest thoroughfares. Also, as a deterrent, he said, Roman authorities devised various means whereby the victim could remain on the cross for days in public before eventually expiring.
"The Gospel narrative of the flogging, hauling the crossbeam and crucifixion is plausible and relatively accurate," Harvey said. " ... Beyond any theological issue, the Gospels give a good description. By the time of the crucifixion of Jesus, crucifixion for troublemakers was well established in Judea. ... So people knew what to expect."
In some senses, the crucifixion of Jesus helped bring an end to that execution method among Romans. Constantine the Great, the first Christian emperor of Rome, discontinued its use in the Roman Empire in the fourth century in reverence for Jesus Christ.
---
© 2004, The Kansas City Star.
Visit The Star Web edition on the World Wide Web at http://www.kcstar.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
http://www.cuadp.org/news/KRTWire02-23-2004.htm
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
Friday, April 28, 2006
Plainfield Symphony Pops Concert - April 29, 2006
*
The Plainfield Symphony Presents
The Plainfield Pops: Broadway & Movie Classics
Saturday April 29, 2006 8:00 PM
Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church
East 7th Streeet and Watchung Avenue, Plainfield
Sabin Pautza, conductor
Terri Cerritto, vocalist
Featuring songs by Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Henry Mancini, Richard
Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, and more!
Tickets available at the door: $25-$45, Seniors $15
After the concert, please join us at the Conductor's Circle Reception
$35 donation per person includes buffet and drinks
At the Home of
Dr. Joseph & Vee DeMeyer
443 Stelle Avenue
Plainfield, NJ 07060
Everyone is welcome the evening of the 29th, but if you definitely know
you'll be attending, please RSVP to the PSO Hotline: (908) 561-5140
*
The Plainfield Symphony Presents
The Plainfield Pops: Broadway & Movie Classics
Saturday April 29, 2006 8:00 PM
Crescent Avenue Presbyterian Church
East 7th Streeet and Watchung Avenue, Plainfield
Sabin Pautza, conductor
Terri Cerritto, vocalist
Featuring songs by Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, Henry Mancini, Richard
Rodgers, Stephen Sondheim, and more!
Tickets available at the door: $25-$45, Seniors $15
After the concert, please join us at the Conductor's Circle Reception
$35 donation per person includes buffet and drinks
At the Home of
Dr. Joseph & Vee DeMeyer
443 Stelle Avenue
Plainfield, NJ 07060
Everyone is welcome the evening of the 29th, but if you definitely know
you'll be attending, please RSVP to the PSO Hotline: (908) 561-5140
*
Toronto Globe & Mail - Pete Seeger - One hot octogenarian
*
"Why Pete Seeger is one hot octogenarian"
After 86 years, the legend may be conserving his voice, JAMES ADAMS writes, but he's still inspiring activists and rock gods -- just ask Bruce Springsteen
JAMES ADAMS
"It's a very great mistake
to let pessimism get you down."
-- Pete Seeger, 1972
This is Pete Seeger.
And so it is, 86 years young (87 on May 3) at the end of a telephone line stretching from Toronto to the Hudson River town of Beacon, N.Y., which Seeger and Toshi, his wife of almost 63 years, have called home since 1949.
The voice sounds like Pete Seeger, at once light, authoritative, engaging -- instantly familiar, in short, to anyone who's ever attended a Seeger concert and been exhorted to sing along to Cotton Fields or a Bantu ballad, or who's heard his rousing "split tenor" on the hundreds of recordings he's made since 1941, or caught him on TV shows like Sesame Street, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Canada's own Singalong Jubilee.
"Legend," of course, is a much overused word nowadays, indiscriminately applied to everyone from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Neil Diamond.
But it's an accurate descriptor for Seeger, draping as easily on his tall, lanky frame as his famous five-string banjo drapes over his shoulder. If there's a more beloved ex-Communist in the world, I don't know his (or her) name. Karl Marx wrote a pretty groovy book in The Communist Manifesto but Pete Seeger wrote If I Had a Hammer, Turn! Turn! Turn! and Where Have All the Flowers Gone.
Seeger confesses he doesn't do much singing these days, at least not in front of large crowds. He says he "strained [his] voice all sorts of ways" through decades of touring. "I just stretched out my neck and shouted when I should have been using my abdomen more. Umpteen versions of Wimoweh do take their toll, you know."
True, he did a concert a year ago in Beacon with Arlo Guthrie, son of the late Woody Guthrie -- you know: the guy who wrote This Land Is Your Land, Pretty Boy Floyd and Pastures of Plenty -- whom Seeger first met in 1939 in New York and accompanied on a, well . . . legendary road trip a year later. "It was a fine evening. We did old songs we knew very well, so it wasn't that onerous. We started with Midnight Special."
At the mention of Midnight Special -- a composition by yet another famous friend from his youth, Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly -- he pulls a characteristic Seegerian manoeuvre: He sort of slides, unprompted, into a related topic. "Y'know, the best version of Midnight Special I ever was involved in was in Canada, at McGill University. There was an audience of maybe 150 and it kept getting better and better as it rolled along. Really great."
And when was this?
"Oh, about 50 years ago."
Even if Seeger is currently husbanding his voice, others are happily singing out of his songbook, most notably Bruce Springsteen whose latest CD, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, (in stores today) features 15 tunes that Pete has performed over the years. ("Does anyone ever call you Peter?" "My wife.") The Boss, 30 years Seeger's junior, has been a friend of Seeger's since the mid-1990s, and first recorded Seeger's adaptation of We Shall Overcome for a two-CD tribute in 1997. Of course, in recent years, Springsteen has cast himself as a populist, politicized troubadour in the mould of Guthrie and Seeger, especially so in 2004 when he performed several concerts in support of John Kerry's candidacy against George W. Bush. The failure of that effort reportedly put the Boss in a depressive funk for several months. Did Springsteen seek Seeger's counsel, since Seeger certainly has known his share of sorrow yet been able to "dress himself in happiness to stagger about this agonized world?"
"No, he did not," Seeger avers. In fact, he didn't know New Jersey's second favourite son -- Frank Sinatra is probably the first -- was preparing We Shall Overcome "until I heard about it in the press" earlier this year. Springsteen, he says, finally "called me up about two weeks ago and said, 'I've done this record, and we're callin' it The Seeger Project [sic], and it was a lotta fun and we did it all in my home in Rumson [N.J.].' "
Seeger has since heard the record and likes it. "I was really quite proud that he did it on his own." When it's mentioned that Overcome has much lusher palette and boom-boxier sound than any Seeger recording (14 musicians playing guitars, banjo, tuba, trumpet, violin and accordion can do that), Seeger laughs in agreement. "I wonder what Dan Emmett would think of Old Dan Tucker [the album's lead track]. It's pretty fantastic."
Emmett, he explains, was the one who first popularized the story of Tucker, a rowdy man who "washed his face with a fryin' pan and combed his hair with a wagon wheel." In fact, "it was No. 1 in the Top 40 of 1844." Again, Seeger does a little sideways shuffle: "Emmett wrote Dixie, y'know. He was a Union man, but here's this song that became the anthem of the Confederacy [during the American Civil War, 1861-65]."
Seeger, of course, was playing "world music" well before the term was invented or came to be a standalone section in the neighbourhood record store. Puerto Rican and Cuban revolutionary songs (including the famous Guantanamera), Indian hymns, African chants, Indonesian lullabyes, Caribbean melodies -- he's done 'em all and then some, usually (in concert at least) seducing the audience into participating since music, to his way of thinking, has always been a social thing, the performer more ennobling enabler than showbiz star. In fact, he's often called himself "a tool for the song" and during the 1960s and 1970s the parchment body of his banjo sported the message "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" -- a riff, of course, on the famous slogan "This machine kills fascists" that Woody Guthrie inscribed on his guitar.
Seeger credits his father "for getting me into all this." A comparative musicologist, Charles Seeger started the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1912, but when his pacifist and socialist leanings began to irritate trustees, he went on an extended sabbatical from which he never returned, eventually ending up as head of musical theory at the Juilliard School in New York, where Pete was born. His mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, was a musician and teacher, too, as was his stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger. (Constance and Charles divorced in 1927.) Pete got immersed in the folk idiom around 1935 or 1936 in large part because his father and stepmother had been hired to transcribe the thousands of folks songs that John and Alan Lomax were recording throughout the American south for the Library of Congress. By late 1939, Seeger had dropped out of his second year at Harvard (a scholarship student, he was majoring in sociology with an eye to becoming a journalist) and was working as a $60-a-month assistant to Alan Lomax in Washington. In the spring, Woody Guthrie invited a 20-year-old Pete to accompany him on a road trip to Texas, where Guthrie's wife and baby were staying with relatives.
Their meandering sojourn came to a halt, at least temporarily, in Oklahoma City, where Guthrie's car was repossessed. Guthrie returned to New York while Seeger, a banjo strapped over his shoulder, spent the remainder of 1940 hitchhiking to Montana, then south into Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee.
"Woody taught me a few songs that would bring in a few nickels or dimes," Seeger recalls. "He also gave me advice about surviving on the road. . . . He said, 'If you're hungry, go into a bar, order a nickel beer and sip it as slow as you can. After a while, someone's bound to notice that banjo and come up and say, 'Kid, can you play that?' " At that point, Guthrie recommended that Seeger shrug non-committally and then go back to nursing his beer, because "eventually, somebody's going to say, 'Kid, I'll give you a quarter right now if you play that thing.' "
Seeger says he'll be bringing his banjo to Toronto in mid-June when he puts in a much-anticipated appearance at the sixth annual ideaCity conference. Sometimes described as a "Mecca for lateral thinking," the ideaCity usually runs over three days and features more than 40 speakers, each of whom is asked to talk unscripted for about 20 minutes, then chat with the audience.
For Seeger, who once said that his primary skill as an entertainer has been "a knack for knowing the right song for the right audience," this should be a cakewalk. But beyond the one or two songs he'll perform, he admits he's been giving his presentation some thought. "Without giving too much away, I'm gonna be a devil's advocate in a kind of way. I'll not be presenting ideas for toys that rich people can spend their money on, but talking about how we can save the world from collapse in the next 50 or 100 years."
If that sounds heavy, well, Seeger insists it won't be. "You see, if there's still a world here in 100 years, it's not going to have been saved by One Big Thing. One Big Things can be co-opted and corrupted and turned to mush. . . . All my life I've been aware that there's a whole class of very rich people who control the country and this has been going on a long, long while. . . . But what are they going to do about tens of millions of little things, good things? Like maybe some mothers or teachers and children who start growing a healthy garden in a vacant, ugly inner-city lot. . . ." Or his brother John, a former high-school principal and pacifist, still alive at 92, who likes to ponder the question: "How can I cure a kid of being a bully?"
"Oh, June's sure turning into a busy month for me," Seeger sighs. But there's always time, it seems, for Canada, which put out the welcome mat for him in 1955 after he was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to discuss his politics at the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the Great White North, he found work at concerts, TV shows and the National Film Board. "A wonderful country, Canada. And to have survived so near Uncle Sam." At this he recalls visiting a school in Connecticut 10 years ago and meeting an African-Canadian student. Seeger asked him: "In a word, what's the difference between the United States and Canada?" The student replied: "I can't give you a word but I can give you a sentence: Canada's Uncle Sam's poor relative but with a better health-care system."
"I thought that was a pretty good answer," Seeger says with a chuckle.
Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is being released today. ideaCity runs June 21-23 at the Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060425.SEEGER25/TPStory/TPEntertainment/?pageRequested=all&print=true
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
"Why Pete Seeger is one hot octogenarian"
After 86 years, the legend may be conserving his voice, JAMES ADAMS writes, but he's still inspiring activists and rock gods -- just ask Bruce Springsteen
JAMES ADAMS
"It's a very great mistake
to let pessimism get you down."
-- Pete Seeger, 1972
This is Pete Seeger.
And so it is, 86 years young (87 on May 3) at the end of a telephone line stretching from Toronto to the Hudson River town of Beacon, N.Y., which Seeger and Toshi, his wife of almost 63 years, have called home since 1949.
The voice sounds like Pete Seeger, at once light, authoritative, engaging -- instantly familiar, in short, to anyone who's ever attended a Seeger concert and been exhorted to sing along to Cotton Fields or a Bantu ballad, or who's heard his rousing "split tenor" on the hundreds of recordings he's made since 1941, or caught him on TV shows like Sesame Street, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and Canada's own Singalong Jubilee.
"Legend," of course, is a much overused word nowadays, indiscriminately applied to everyone from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Neil Diamond.
But it's an accurate descriptor for Seeger, draping as easily on his tall, lanky frame as his famous five-string banjo drapes over his shoulder. If there's a more beloved ex-Communist in the world, I don't know his (or her) name. Karl Marx wrote a pretty groovy book in The Communist Manifesto but Pete Seeger wrote If I Had a Hammer, Turn! Turn! Turn! and Where Have All the Flowers Gone.
Seeger confesses he doesn't do much singing these days, at least not in front of large crowds. He says he "strained [his] voice all sorts of ways" through decades of touring. "I just stretched out my neck and shouted when I should have been using my abdomen more. Umpteen versions of Wimoweh do take their toll, you know."
True, he did a concert a year ago in Beacon with Arlo Guthrie, son of the late Woody Guthrie -- you know: the guy who wrote This Land Is Your Land, Pretty Boy Floyd and Pastures of Plenty -- whom Seeger first met in 1939 in New York and accompanied on a, well . . . legendary road trip a year later. "It was a fine evening. We did old songs we knew very well, so it wasn't that onerous. We started with Midnight Special."
At the mention of Midnight Special -- a composition by yet another famous friend from his youth, Huddie Ledbetter, aka Leadbelly -- he pulls a characteristic Seegerian manoeuvre: He sort of slides, unprompted, into a related topic. "Y'know, the best version of Midnight Special I ever was involved in was in Canada, at McGill University. There was an audience of maybe 150 and it kept getting better and better as it rolled along. Really great."
And when was this?
"Oh, about 50 years ago."
Even if Seeger is currently husbanding his voice, others are happily singing out of his songbook, most notably Bruce Springsteen whose latest CD, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, (in stores today) features 15 tunes that Pete has performed over the years. ("Does anyone ever call you Peter?" "My wife.") The Boss, 30 years Seeger's junior, has been a friend of Seeger's since the mid-1990s, and first recorded Seeger's adaptation of We Shall Overcome for a two-CD tribute in 1997. Of course, in recent years, Springsteen has cast himself as a populist, politicized troubadour in the mould of Guthrie and Seeger, especially so in 2004 when he performed several concerts in support of John Kerry's candidacy against George W. Bush. The failure of that effort reportedly put the Boss in a depressive funk for several months. Did Springsteen seek Seeger's counsel, since Seeger certainly has known his share of sorrow yet been able to "dress himself in happiness to stagger about this agonized world?"
"No, he did not," Seeger avers. In fact, he didn't know New Jersey's second favourite son -- Frank Sinatra is probably the first -- was preparing We Shall Overcome "until I heard about it in the press" earlier this year. Springsteen, he says, finally "called me up about two weeks ago and said, 'I've done this record, and we're callin' it The Seeger Project [sic], and it was a lotta fun and we did it all in my home in Rumson [N.J.].' "
Seeger has since heard the record and likes it. "I was really quite proud that he did it on his own." When it's mentioned that Overcome has much lusher palette and boom-boxier sound than any Seeger recording (14 musicians playing guitars, banjo, tuba, trumpet, violin and accordion can do that), Seeger laughs in agreement. "I wonder what Dan Emmett would think of Old Dan Tucker [the album's lead track]. It's pretty fantastic."
Emmett, he explains, was the one who first popularized the story of Tucker, a rowdy man who "washed his face with a fryin' pan and combed his hair with a wagon wheel." In fact, "it was No. 1 in the Top 40 of 1844." Again, Seeger does a little sideways shuffle: "Emmett wrote Dixie, y'know. He was a Union man, but here's this song that became the anthem of the Confederacy [during the American Civil War, 1861-65]."
Seeger, of course, was playing "world music" well before the term was invented or came to be a standalone section in the neighbourhood record store. Puerto Rican and Cuban revolutionary songs (including the famous Guantanamera), Indian hymns, African chants, Indonesian lullabyes, Caribbean melodies -- he's done 'em all and then some, usually (in concert at least) seducing the audience into participating since music, to his way of thinking, has always been a social thing, the performer more ennobling enabler than showbiz star. In fact, he's often called himself "a tool for the song" and during the 1960s and 1970s the parchment body of his banjo sported the message "This machine surrounds hate and forces it to surrender" -- a riff, of course, on the famous slogan "This machine kills fascists" that Woody Guthrie inscribed on his guitar.
Seeger credits his father "for getting me into all this." A comparative musicologist, Charles Seeger started the music department at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1912, but when his pacifist and socialist leanings began to irritate trustees, he went on an extended sabbatical from which he never returned, eventually ending up as head of musical theory at the Juilliard School in New York, where Pete was born. His mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, was a musician and teacher, too, as was his stepmother, Ruth Crawford Seeger. (Constance and Charles divorced in 1927.) Pete got immersed in the folk idiom around 1935 or 1936 in large part because his father and stepmother had been hired to transcribe the thousands of folks songs that John and Alan Lomax were recording throughout the American south for the Library of Congress. By late 1939, Seeger had dropped out of his second year at Harvard (a scholarship student, he was majoring in sociology with an eye to becoming a journalist) and was working as a $60-a-month assistant to Alan Lomax in Washington. In the spring, Woody Guthrie invited a 20-year-old Pete to accompany him on a road trip to Texas, where Guthrie's wife and baby were staying with relatives.
Their meandering sojourn came to a halt, at least temporarily, in Oklahoma City, where Guthrie's car was repossessed. Guthrie returned to New York while Seeger, a banjo strapped over his shoulder, spent the remainder of 1940 hitchhiking to Montana, then south into Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee.
"Woody taught me a few songs that would bring in a few nickels or dimes," Seeger recalls. "He also gave me advice about surviving on the road. . . . He said, 'If you're hungry, go into a bar, order a nickel beer and sip it as slow as you can. After a while, someone's bound to notice that banjo and come up and say, 'Kid, can you play that?' " At that point, Guthrie recommended that Seeger shrug non-committally and then go back to nursing his beer, because "eventually, somebody's going to say, 'Kid, I'll give you a quarter right now if you play that thing.' "
Seeger says he'll be bringing his banjo to Toronto in mid-June when he puts in a much-anticipated appearance at the sixth annual ideaCity conference. Sometimes described as a "Mecca for lateral thinking," the ideaCity usually runs over three days and features more than 40 speakers, each of whom is asked to talk unscripted for about 20 minutes, then chat with the audience.
For Seeger, who once said that his primary skill as an entertainer has been "a knack for knowing the right song for the right audience," this should be a cakewalk. But beyond the one or two songs he'll perform, he admits he's been giving his presentation some thought. "Without giving too much away, I'm gonna be a devil's advocate in a kind of way. I'll not be presenting ideas for toys that rich people can spend their money on, but talking about how we can save the world from collapse in the next 50 or 100 years."
If that sounds heavy, well, Seeger insists it won't be. "You see, if there's still a world here in 100 years, it's not going to have been saved by One Big Thing. One Big Things can be co-opted and corrupted and turned to mush. . . . All my life I've been aware that there's a whole class of very rich people who control the country and this has been going on a long, long while. . . . But what are they going to do about tens of millions of little things, good things? Like maybe some mothers or teachers and children who start growing a healthy garden in a vacant, ugly inner-city lot. . . ." Or his brother John, a former high-school principal and pacifist, still alive at 92, who likes to ponder the question: "How can I cure a kid of being a bully?"
"Oh, June's sure turning into a busy month for me," Seeger sighs. But there's always time, it seems, for Canada, which put out the welcome mat for him in 1955 after he was held in contempt of Congress for refusing to discuss his politics at the House Un-American Activities Committee. In the Great White North, he found work at concerts, TV shows and the National Film Board. "A wonderful country, Canada. And to have survived so near Uncle Sam." At this he recalls visiting a school in Connecticut 10 years ago and meeting an African-Canadian student. Seeger asked him: "In a word, what's the difference between the United States and Canada?" The student replied: "I can't give you a word but I can give you a sentence: Canada's Uncle Sam's poor relative but with a better health-care system."
"I thought that was a pretty good answer," Seeger says with a chuckle.
Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is being released today. ideaCity runs June 21-23 at the Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060425.SEEGER25/TPStory/TPEntertainment/?pageRequested=all&print=true
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Ledger - Cory Booker - Transition guide being prepared
*
"Booker nonprofit creating a guide on urban issues"
Group was formed to aid mayoral transition
Friday, April 21, 2006
BY KATIE WANG
Star-Ledger Staff
While Mayor Sharpe James prepares to head a new institute on urban issues, another nonprofit group with ties to mayoral candi date Cory Booker also has been quietly examining the same topics.
The group, called The Institute for Urban Excellence, was founded about a year ago by a group of Newark residents and outsiders that included Booker. The idea was to organize a "how-to" guide on running an inner-city, drawing ideas from Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and Baltimore.
If he is elected, the guide could figure prominently into Booker's new administration.
"I'm sure it's going to be helpful in the transition and the administration," Booker said yesterday. Even if he does not win the May 9 election, Booker said he hopes his chief opponent, Ronald L. Rice, would use the document.
The institute started with the idea that Booker might be elected as mayor, said Richard Roper, a public policy consultant who also worked for former Mayor Kenneth Gibson. Roper said a mixed group of Newark policy wonks and people from outside of the city were brought together to study how other cities were governed.
The idea is similar to a think tank that existed under Gibson's administration called the Office of Newark Studies.
"We thought, wouldn't it be great if there were well-imple mented actions that could be launched expeditiously?" Roper said.
They recruited Bo Kemp, an entrepreneur and a founder of Vanguarde Media, with no ties to Newark, to act as the director of the group. Kemp said the group decided to focus on public safety, economic development, child and family well-being, government operations, education, health care and technology.
Kemp said the group has spent the last year traveling to Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Washington and Chicago to see how they run programs in those areas.
In the end, he said, the group's goal is to assemble a manual of best practices from each city to hand to the next mayor of Newark to help with the transition period.
"It's a short transition period that these mayors have," Kemp said. "They can't invest the time (after an election) to think through the best policies."
Kemp said he hopes the finished product can be used in other cities as well.
He said he expects the work to be done in about a month -- after the election. Kemp would not reveal who is involved or who is funding the institute because he said its members want to remain politically neutral.
Kemp said when the organization releases its publication, it will also reveal the roughly 25 individuals involved, but not before then because they want to be isolated from the politics of the mayoral race.
Kemp insisted the group is not a political one.
"A significant number of the people are from Newark," said Kemp.
The board of directors include Kemp, Maria Vivvearonto Soto, W. Deen Shareef and Mo Butler.
Shareef and Butler are considered members of Booker's inner circle. Butler runs Booker's nonprofit group, Newark Now, and Shareef is a personal friend of Booker's.
Booker said he occasionally passes along ideas to the group, but insisted there is a firewall between his campaign and the institute. However, when a resident asked Booker at a recent coffee klatch about a transition group, he mentioned the work that the group was doing.
And many of his stump speeches are sprinkled with references to other cities, such as Indianapolis, Baltimore and Chicago.
The group has filed as a non- profit organization with the state and has a Newark mailing address. The filings did not list who was giv ing the group money.
Kemp said the institute recently rented an office on James Street. It has spent the last year meeting in Irvington, Newark and Orange.
Katie Wang is covering the Newark mayoral race. She can be reached at kwang@starledger.com or (973) 392-1504.
http://www.nj.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-0/1145601140291410.xml&coll=1
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
"Booker nonprofit creating a guide on urban issues"
Group was formed to aid mayoral transition
Friday, April 21, 2006
BY KATIE WANG
Star-Ledger Staff
While Mayor Sharpe James prepares to head a new institute on urban issues, another nonprofit group with ties to mayoral candi date Cory Booker also has been quietly examining the same topics.
The group, called The Institute for Urban Excellence, was founded about a year ago by a group of Newark residents and outsiders that included Booker. The idea was to organize a "how-to" guide on running an inner-city, drawing ideas from Chicago, New York City, Los Angeles and Baltimore.
If he is elected, the guide could figure prominently into Booker's new administration.
"I'm sure it's going to be helpful in the transition and the administration," Booker said yesterday. Even if he does not win the May 9 election, Booker said he hopes his chief opponent, Ronald L. Rice, would use the document.
The institute started with the idea that Booker might be elected as mayor, said Richard Roper, a public policy consultant who also worked for former Mayor Kenneth Gibson. Roper said a mixed group of Newark policy wonks and people from outside of the city were brought together to study how other cities were governed.
The idea is similar to a think tank that existed under Gibson's administration called the Office of Newark Studies.
"We thought, wouldn't it be great if there were well-imple mented actions that could be launched expeditiously?" Roper said.
They recruited Bo Kemp, an entrepreneur and a founder of Vanguarde Media, with no ties to Newark, to act as the director of the group. Kemp said the group decided to focus on public safety, economic development, child and family well-being, government operations, education, health care and technology.
Kemp said the group has spent the last year traveling to Los Angeles, New York, Baltimore, Washington and Chicago to see how they run programs in those areas.
In the end, he said, the group's goal is to assemble a manual of best practices from each city to hand to the next mayor of Newark to help with the transition period.
"It's a short transition period that these mayors have," Kemp said. "They can't invest the time (after an election) to think through the best policies."
Kemp said he hopes the finished product can be used in other cities as well.
He said he expects the work to be done in about a month -- after the election. Kemp would not reveal who is involved or who is funding the institute because he said its members want to remain politically neutral.
Kemp said when the organization releases its publication, it will also reveal the roughly 25 individuals involved, but not before then because they want to be isolated from the politics of the mayoral race.
Kemp insisted the group is not a political one.
"A significant number of the people are from Newark," said Kemp.
The board of directors include Kemp, Maria Vivvearonto Soto, W. Deen Shareef and Mo Butler.
Shareef and Butler are considered members of Booker's inner circle. Butler runs Booker's nonprofit group, Newark Now, and Shareef is a personal friend of Booker's.
Booker said he occasionally passes along ideas to the group, but insisted there is a firewall between his campaign and the institute. However, when a resident asked Booker at a recent coffee klatch about a transition group, he mentioned the work that the group was doing.
And many of his stump speeches are sprinkled with references to other cities, such as Indianapolis, Baltimore and Chicago.
The group has filed as a non- profit organization with the state and has a Newark mailing address. The filings did not list who was giv ing the group money.
Kemp said the institute recently rented an office on James Street. It has spent the last year meeting in Irvington, Newark and Orange.
Katie Wang is covering the Newark mayoral race. She can be reached at kwang@starledger.com or (973) 392-1504.
http://www.nj.com/printer/printer.ssf?/base/news-0/1145601140291410.xml&coll=1
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
Los Angeles Times - Jane Jacobs - Obituary
*
"Jane Jacobs, 89; Urban Theorist, Community Activist Who Fought Lower Manhattan Freeway Plan"
By Mary Rourke
Times Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist and community activist whose books argued for the rehabilitation of neighborhoods on traditional lines, breaking with emerging trends in city development, died Tuesday. She was 89.
An American-born citizen of Canada, Jacobs died at a hospital in Toronto of natural causes, according to publicist Sally Marvin of Random House, Jacobs' publisher. Jacobs was admitted to the hospital late last week and had been in failing health for several years.
She was internationally known as an advocate of cities with distinct neighborhoods, built to a human scale, mixing commercial and residential space.
She was against building highways that cut through city centers and was once arrested at a public hearing after she stormed the podium to express her opposition to a plan for an expressway through lower Manhattan.
"Jane Jacobs' thinking about cities was clear and it came from a person who lived in cities," Toronto Mayor David Miller told The Times on Tuesday. "She didn't just write about urban issues. She acted on her convictions."
Jacobs' most influential work, 1961's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," set the stage for a battle that Jacobs waged for decades. Defying popular theories on how to renew city slums by plowing them under and replacing them with uniform housing projects, she pushed for recycled buildings and new structures scaled to the existing neighborhood.
Her feisty prose often read like a manifesto. "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding," she announced in the opening paragraph of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
She continued: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women's magazines."
In her view a successful city needed vibrant neighborhoods linked by public transportation. Each area needed its own mix of old and new buildings, a constant influx of smaller, independent businesses, and a range of residential and commercial space.
Early critics accused her of being short on realistic solutions to the challenges of urban life. Admirers called her a maverick and a comprehensive thinker. Thirty years later, when her books were required reading in graduate school programs and many of her beliefs about cities were widely accepted, she was praised as a visionary and a pivotal figure in her field.
"It's not that the world was one way before Jane Jacobs and changed 180 degrees because of her," Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of the New Yorker magazine, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2003.
It was more a case of Jacobs daring to voice her complaints in a firm, public manner.
"Nobody else spoke out against the establishment the way Jacobs did," Goldberger said. "In the '50s, American cities were generally considered messy, undesirable things. Suburban life was considered the ideal. Jane Jacobs fought valiantly in defense of plain, old-fashioned, urban life."
She was opposed to the use of bulldozers as a tool for urban renewal. "From her point of view," Goldberger said, "nothing was being renewed. It was all being destroyed." Referring to Jacobs' "The Death and Life of American Cities" as "arguably the most important book written about cities in the 20th century," he summed up her attitude toward tear-down renewal: "The emperor of city planning has no clothes."
As a writer and community activist, Jacobs' energy was unrelenting. She challenged the views of influential thinkers such as historian Lewis Mumford, author of "The Culture of Cities."
Her most audacious outburst came in the 1960s when New York City planner and power broker Robert Moses announced his plan for an expressway through the Washington Square area in lower Manhattan.
Jacobs attended the public hearing where she and other protesters vocally opposed the plan.
"He was one of the first speakers," she recalled of Moses, in a 2000 interview with the Associated Press. "He was furious and he stood up there, inside the railed enclosure, and not where most speakers spoke — outside where the public microphone was. He was privileged.
"He gripped this railing and he said, in dismissing scornfully our plan to have no more than the existing road and better not even that, he said, 'These protests are just by a bunch of … a bunch of mothers!' "
Jacobs, joined by other protesters, then rushed the podium, disrupting the meeting.
She was arrested on several charges, including criminal mischief, which established her as a terror, at least around City Hall. It also reduced to rubble any view that Jacobs was merely a disheveled, jolly-faced lady with the big, round glasses.
Rather, she was "a far-sighted genius who guided cities in new directions," Robert Caro, who wrote a biography of Moses, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. Her battle with Moses was "one of the truly heroic sagas in the history of New York," Caro said.
Jacobs first staked her claim as the bane of the establishment in 1961 when she led the opposition against a tear-down plan for her West Village neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Redevelopers intended to take out the brownstones and small apartment complexes in the area and replace them with a housing project that covered several blocks.
She argued against demolition and offered her own proposal, which preserved existing housing and added a middle-income apartment complex built to scale. Eventually, the plan she helped devise was approved.
"In the '60s, technocrats were leading the way in urban planning," architect Eric Owen Moss told The Times in 2003.
His Los Angeles-based firm has recycled office space for housing and blended recycled buildings with new structures in the Jacobs tradition.
"Jacobs was a unique, sensitive voice for a different point of view," Moss said. "The technocrat said, 'We'll put an expressway here, a dam there, a high-rise here'. She said, 'Let's not build the expressway through peoples' backyards. Let's keep the continuity of the existing neighborhood. And let's have parks.' "
Forty years after she helped defeat plans for an expressway through lower Manhattan, Jacobs was still receiving phone calls from community activists across North America, seeking her guidance. In 2000, concerned citizens of Pittsburgh wanted to block a redevelopment project that would have wiped out two of the city's downtown streets. Jacobs offered coaching by phone, and the Pittsburgh activists won their battle.
Her credentials for the role of urban strategist were comparatively sparse. Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pa., she graduated from high school and worked briefly as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune before she moved to New York City. There she attended classes at Columbia University but did not complete her college degree.
She went to work as a freelance journalist covering urban issues. In 1952, she was hired by Architecture Forum magazine. She became a senior editor and remained on the staff until 1962. In her essay, "Downtown Is for People," included in the book, "The Exploding Metropolis" (1958), Jacobs suggested ways to revitalize downtown areas.
She criticized governmental civic centers as "pretentious and dull" and said that shopping centers all look alike. The goal of urban renewal should be to make a city's core, "more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than ever," she wrote.
Through the 1960s Jacobs was appointed to a series of government projects, including New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay's Task Force on Housing and the Task Force on Natural Beauty, overseen by then-First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, that supported the planting of shrubs and flowers in public places.
She had gained both respect and notoriety in a male-dominated field, in a steeply competitive city. Then, somewhat abruptly, in 1968, Jacobs and her husband of 24 years, architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, moved their family of three children to Toronto.
The Jacobs, who had two sons close to draft age, opposed the Vietnam War. In 1974, Jane Jacobs became a Canadian citizen.
"Jane was part of a group of extremely articulate, independent thinking, highly accomplished people" who had a strong impact on the growth of the city, said Joe Berridge of Urban Strategies, a planning firm in Toronto. "By the early '70s, a few years after they settled in Toronto, it was taking off and becoming a great city."
Within months of her arrival in Toronto, Jacobs imprinted her style when she joined a group of urban activists battling a proposed downtown expressway. The plan was ultimately defeated.
More recently, she fought a plan to build a bridge from downtown Toronto to the airport. "Storming the barricades with the help of her walker," Berridge said of Jacobs' style.
Urban planners in Toronto credit Jacobs with helping preserve the city's highly livable neighborhoods and saving some of its worthy old buildings. Outspoken to the point of being brash, she once declared that the city planning board of Toronto was "brain-dead."
"Jane Jacobs had a strong anti-bureaucratic bent," said Eudora Pendergrast, who worked as a city planner for Toronto in the early '90s and more recently opened her own consulting firm. "That statement had an incredible effect. It shaped an effort by planners to be less bureaucratic. Jane Jacobs was highly respected."
She continued to write books on her favorite topic. In "The Economy of Cities" (1969) and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" (1984) she argued that the financial health of a nation depends on productive cities.
In one instance, she used Japan as an example. After World War II, a number of Japanese cities developed bicycle manufacturing factories that boosted the local economy. Business grew to the point where those cities were able to expand into automobile production. Within 30 years the Japanese economy went from one of the weakest to one of the strongest in the world.
Some critics challenged Jacobs for leaping too freely from the specific to the general. "She was on much firmer ground when she wrote about structure and form," Goldberger said. "There, her theories bore out."
When she was in her 80s and still living in the house she once shared with her husband and three children, journalists continued to called on her. Several of them made note of her eccentric taste in home decor.
Porch furniture in the living room, a closet converted to a telephone booth and a wooden model for a fighter plane fuel tank as a door stop were seen as proof of her commitment to recycling.
At age 88, she toured to promote her book, "Dark Age Ahead" (2004), taking questions with the help of an old-fashioned ear trumpet.
In the book she wrote that family and community bonds need reinforcing and that cities need a self-policing system to keep professionals in check.
To get to that point, her suggestion was to start small. "Everything is connected to everything else," she wrote. "...if something is corrected and improved it's likely to affect other things beneficially."
Jacobs' passion for cities never left her. "All through organized human history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, during a conference about her work held in Toronto. "Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas."
Her husband died in 1996. She is survived by two sons, one daughter, two grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a brother.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jacobs26apr26,0,1672108,print.story?coll=la-home-obituaries
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
"Jane Jacobs, 89; Urban Theorist, Community Activist Who Fought Lower Manhattan Freeway Plan"
By Mary Rourke
Times Staff Writer
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist and community activist whose books argued for the rehabilitation of neighborhoods on traditional lines, breaking with emerging trends in city development, died Tuesday. She was 89.
An American-born citizen of Canada, Jacobs died at a hospital in Toronto of natural causes, according to publicist Sally Marvin of Random House, Jacobs' publisher. Jacobs was admitted to the hospital late last week and had been in failing health for several years.
She was internationally known as an advocate of cities with distinct neighborhoods, built to a human scale, mixing commercial and residential space.
She was against building highways that cut through city centers and was once arrested at a public hearing after she stormed the podium to express her opposition to a plan for an expressway through lower Manhattan.
"Jane Jacobs' thinking about cities was clear and it came from a person who lived in cities," Toronto Mayor David Miller told The Times on Tuesday. "She didn't just write about urban issues. She acted on her convictions."
Jacobs' most influential work, 1961's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," set the stage for a battle that Jacobs waged for decades. Defying popular theories on how to renew city slums by plowing them under and replacing them with uniform housing projects, she pushed for recycled buildings and new structures scaled to the existing neighborhood.
Her feisty prose often read like a manifesto. "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding," she announced in the opening paragraph of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
She continued: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women's magazines."
In her view a successful city needed vibrant neighborhoods linked by public transportation. Each area needed its own mix of old and new buildings, a constant influx of smaller, independent businesses, and a range of residential and commercial space.
Early critics accused her of being short on realistic solutions to the challenges of urban life. Admirers called her a maverick and a comprehensive thinker. Thirty years later, when her books were required reading in graduate school programs and many of her beliefs about cities were widely accepted, she was praised as a visionary and a pivotal figure in her field.
"It's not that the world was one way before Jane Jacobs and changed 180 degrees because of her," Paul Goldberger, architecture critic of the New Yorker magazine, said in an interview with the Los Angeles Times in 2003.
It was more a case of Jacobs daring to voice her complaints in a firm, public manner.
"Nobody else spoke out against the establishment the way Jacobs did," Goldberger said. "In the '50s, American cities were generally considered messy, undesirable things. Suburban life was considered the ideal. Jane Jacobs fought valiantly in defense of plain, old-fashioned, urban life."
She was opposed to the use of bulldozers as a tool for urban renewal. "From her point of view," Goldberger said, "nothing was being renewed. It was all being destroyed." Referring to Jacobs' "The Death and Life of American Cities" as "arguably the most important book written about cities in the 20th century," he summed up her attitude toward tear-down renewal: "The emperor of city planning has no clothes."
As a writer and community activist, Jacobs' energy was unrelenting. She challenged the views of influential thinkers such as historian Lewis Mumford, author of "The Culture of Cities."
Her most audacious outburst came in the 1960s when New York City planner and power broker Robert Moses announced his plan for an expressway through the Washington Square area in lower Manhattan.
Jacobs attended the public hearing where she and other protesters vocally opposed the plan.
"He was one of the first speakers," she recalled of Moses, in a 2000 interview with the Associated Press. "He was furious and he stood up there, inside the railed enclosure, and not where most speakers spoke — outside where the public microphone was. He was privileged.
"He gripped this railing and he said, in dismissing scornfully our plan to have no more than the existing road and better not even that, he said, 'These protests are just by a bunch of … a bunch of mothers!' "
Jacobs, joined by other protesters, then rushed the podium, disrupting the meeting.
She was arrested on several charges, including criminal mischief, which established her as a terror, at least around City Hall. It also reduced to rubble any view that Jacobs was merely a disheveled, jolly-faced lady with the big, round glasses.
Rather, she was "a far-sighted genius who guided cities in new directions," Robert Caro, who wrote a biography of Moses, told the Associated Press on Tuesday. Her battle with Moses was "one of the truly heroic sagas in the history of New York," Caro said.
Jacobs first staked her claim as the bane of the establishment in 1961 when she led the opposition against a tear-down plan for her West Village neighborhood in lower Manhattan. Redevelopers intended to take out the brownstones and small apartment complexes in the area and replace them with a housing project that covered several blocks.
She argued against demolition and offered her own proposal, which preserved existing housing and added a middle-income apartment complex built to scale. Eventually, the plan she helped devise was approved.
"In the '60s, technocrats were leading the way in urban planning," architect Eric Owen Moss told The Times in 2003.
His Los Angeles-based firm has recycled office space for housing and blended recycled buildings with new structures in the Jacobs tradition.
"Jacobs was a unique, sensitive voice for a different point of view," Moss said. "The technocrat said, 'We'll put an expressway here, a dam there, a high-rise here'. She said, 'Let's not build the expressway through peoples' backyards. Let's keep the continuity of the existing neighborhood. And let's have parks.' "
Forty years after she helped defeat plans for an expressway through lower Manhattan, Jacobs was still receiving phone calls from community activists across North America, seeking her guidance. In 2000, concerned citizens of Pittsburgh wanted to block a redevelopment project that would have wiped out two of the city's downtown streets. Jacobs offered coaching by phone, and the Pittsburgh activists won their battle.
Her credentials for the role of urban strategist were comparatively sparse. Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pa., she graduated from high school and worked briefly as a reporter on the Scranton Tribune before she moved to New York City. There she attended classes at Columbia University but did not complete her college degree.
She went to work as a freelance journalist covering urban issues. In 1952, she was hired by Architecture Forum magazine. She became a senior editor and remained on the staff until 1962. In her essay, "Downtown Is for People," included in the book, "The Exploding Metropolis" (1958), Jacobs suggested ways to revitalize downtown areas.
She criticized governmental civic centers as "pretentious and dull" and said that shopping centers all look alike. The goal of urban renewal should be to make a city's core, "more surprising, more compact, more variegated, and busier than ever," she wrote.
Through the 1960s Jacobs was appointed to a series of government projects, including New York City Mayor John V. Lindsay's Task Force on Housing and the Task Force on Natural Beauty, overseen by then-First Lady Lady Bird Johnson, that supported the planting of shrubs and flowers in public places.
She had gained both respect and notoriety in a male-dominated field, in a steeply competitive city. Then, somewhat abruptly, in 1968, Jacobs and her husband of 24 years, architect Robert Hyde Jacobs, moved their family of three children to Toronto.
The Jacobs, who had two sons close to draft age, opposed the Vietnam War. In 1974, Jane Jacobs became a Canadian citizen.
"Jane was part of a group of extremely articulate, independent thinking, highly accomplished people" who had a strong impact on the growth of the city, said Joe Berridge of Urban Strategies, a planning firm in Toronto. "By the early '70s, a few years after they settled in Toronto, it was taking off and becoming a great city."
Within months of her arrival in Toronto, Jacobs imprinted her style when she joined a group of urban activists battling a proposed downtown expressway. The plan was ultimately defeated.
More recently, she fought a plan to build a bridge from downtown Toronto to the airport. "Storming the barricades with the help of her walker," Berridge said of Jacobs' style.
Urban planners in Toronto credit Jacobs with helping preserve the city's highly livable neighborhoods and saving some of its worthy old buildings. Outspoken to the point of being brash, she once declared that the city planning board of Toronto was "brain-dead."
"Jane Jacobs had a strong anti-bureaucratic bent," said Eudora Pendergrast, who worked as a city planner for Toronto in the early '90s and more recently opened her own consulting firm. "That statement had an incredible effect. It shaped an effort by planners to be less bureaucratic. Jane Jacobs was highly respected."
She continued to write books on her favorite topic. In "The Economy of Cities" (1969) and "Cities and the Wealth of Nations" (1984) she argued that the financial health of a nation depends on productive cities.
In one instance, she used Japan as an example. After World War II, a number of Japanese cities developed bicycle manufacturing factories that boosted the local economy. Business grew to the point where those cities were able to expand into automobile production. Within 30 years the Japanese economy went from one of the weakest to one of the strongest in the world.
Some critics challenged Jacobs for leaping too freely from the specific to the general. "She was on much firmer ground when she wrote about structure and form," Goldberger said. "There, her theories bore out."
When she was in her 80s and still living in the house she once shared with her husband and three children, journalists continued to called on her. Several of them made note of her eccentric taste in home decor.
Porch furniture in the living room, a closet converted to a telephone booth and a wooden model for a fighter plane fuel tank as a door stop were seen as proof of her commitment to recycling.
At age 88, she toured to promote her book, "Dark Age Ahead" (2004), taking questions with the help of an old-fashioned ear trumpet.
In the book she wrote that family and community bonds need reinforcing and that cities need a self-policing system to keep professionals in check.
To get to that point, her suggestion was to start small. "Everything is connected to everything else," she wrote. "...if something is corrected and improved it's likely to affect other things beneficially."
Jacobs' passion for cities never left her. "All through organized human history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities," she told the Los Angeles Times in 1997, during a conference about her work held in Toronto. "Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas."
Her husband died in 1996. She is survived by two sons, one daughter, two grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and a brother.
http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-me-jacobs26apr26,0,1672108,print.story?coll=la-home-obituaries
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - News
*
"Letter of protest Jacobs' last act"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM
ROYSON JAMES
Sometime soon Toronto will decide on a suitable monument to record that Jane Jacobs lived among us and gave much more than she took.
The American anti-expressway activist who moved here in 1968 gave confidence to proponents of a fledgling Toronto movement that, silly them, believed neighbourhoods mattered; people could live harmoniously downtown; a city is for people, not cars; and the citizen is every bit as wise as the city hall planner.
Those themes still ricochet around Toronto. And we can thank Jacobs, who died yesterday, a week shy of her 90th birthday, in her neighbourhood Toronto Western hospital, following a short illness.
Jacobs, who tapped out seven books on a manual typewriter, was working on two manuscripts at her death. Her last book, Dark Age Ahead was a wake-up call on the dangers facing mankind.
When I finally met the oracle, the guru, she was well into her eighth decade on the planet.
Sitting at a table in her living room on Albany Ave., her hand cupped to her ear to aid her failing hearing, she was a frail shell of her once-robust self.
It was like watching Wayne Gretzky or Babe Ruth or Pele in their final season and wondering what it might have been like when occasional brilliance was the staple of their play. We all grow old and die. The great ones change the way we think or live or experience life.
So it is with Jacobs.
In her last public act, she sent off a letter of support to West Vancouver residents battling expansion of the sea to sky highway through an environmentally sensitive region, son Ned reports.
"I wish to convey my support and admiration to people of West Vancouver who are sacrificing their time, energy and possibly even their freedom to preserve and protect the magnificent and irreplaceable Eagleridge Bluffs and Larson Creek wetlands from this destructive, ill-conceived scheme."
That was sent April 17.
She fought lowly planners and New York's famed municipal boss Robert Moses. She railed against highrise towers and cars cutting through neighbourhoods and runaway development that threatened the viability of downtown neighbourhoods. And wherever citizens gave birth to a cause, her name was used to justify the opposition.
That, of course, is a two-edged sword. For many of her disciples would have been horrified at some of her ideas on the economy, ideas that could be found in any progressive conservative handbook. Maybe that explains why David Crombie cherished her so.
Calling from a vacation spot, the former tiny perfect mayor recalled that he was already teaching Jacobs' ideas, penned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, when he met her in 1968.
"She dealt in a world of ideas and practical application with a sense of right and wrong," Crombie said yesterday. "She taught us that while ideas mattered, acting on them was important. And she added an ethical dimension."
Over the past two years, Jacobs has carried on her rants about the evils of city planners. Always, the audience listened with rapt attention.
The irony is, says former Star city columnist David Lewis Stein, an Annex neighbour, is that Jacobs' disciples violated one of the guru's principal tenets: avoid orthodoxy.
The idea of protecting neighbourhoods and the expansion of the business district into downtown neighbourhoods saved the downtown as a liveable metropolis. But the corollary is de-concentration. Now they call it urban sprawl.
"She gave us the value of the neighbourhood," Stein says. "What her disciples didn't do was build to the next stage ... how do you knit them together in a construct like the GTA?"
In May 2001 in Winnipeg, Jacobs painfully rose to an arching position, her white, out-of-place hair enhancing her legendary status, and addressed the mayors of Canada's five largest urban regions. It was the first meeting called to fertilize an embryonic movement for a new deal for cities.
In a broadside levelled at Ottawa and the provinces, Jacobs urged the unprecedented gathering of mayors to organize their nearly 6.5 million citizens in what amounted to a campaign to save the country.
Jacobs' monumental work is finished. Ours is just beginning.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826816&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
"Letter of protest Jacobs' last act"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM
ROYSON JAMES
Sometime soon Toronto will decide on a suitable monument to record that Jane Jacobs lived among us and gave much more than she took.
The American anti-expressway activist who moved here in 1968 gave confidence to proponents of a fledgling Toronto movement that, silly them, believed neighbourhoods mattered; people could live harmoniously downtown; a city is for people, not cars; and the citizen is every bit as wise as the city hall planner.
Those themes still ricochet around Toronto. And we can thank Jacobs, who died yesterday, a week shy of her 90th birthday, in her neighbourhood Toronto Western hospital, following a short illness.
Jacobs, who tapped out seven books on a manual typewriter, was working on two manuscripts at her death. Her last book, Dark Age Ahead was a wake-up call on the dangers facing mankind.
When I finally met the oracle, the guru, she was well into her eighth decade on the planet.
Sitting at a table in her living room on Albany Ave., her hand cupped to her ear to aid her failing hearing, she was a frail shell of her once-robust self.
It was like watching Wayne Gretzky or Babe Ruth or Pele in their final season and wondering what it might have been like when occasional brilliance was the staple of their play. We all grow old and die. The great ones change the way we think or live or experience life.
So it is with Jacobs.
In her last public act, she sent off a letter of support to West Vancouver residents battling expansion of the sea to sky highway through an environmentally sensitive region, son Ned reports.
"I wish to convey my support and admiration to people of West Vancouver who are sacrificing their time, energy and possibly even their freedom to preserve and protect the magnificent and irreplaceable Eagleridge Bluffs and Larson Creek wetlands from this destructive, ill-conceived scheme."
That was sent April 17.
She fought lowly planners and New York's famed municipal boss Robert Moses. She railed against highrise towers and cars cutting through neighbourhoods and runaway development that threatened the viability of downtown neighbourhoods. And wherever citizens gave birth to a cause, her name was used to justify the opposition.
That, of course, is a two-edged sword. For many of her disciples would have been horrified at some of her ideas on the economy, ideas that could be found in any progressive conservative handbook. Maybe that explains why David Crombie cherished her so.
Calling from a vacation spot, the former tiny perfect mayor recalled that he was already teaching Jacobs' ideas, penned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, when he met her in 1968.
"She dealt in a world of ideas and practical application with a sense of right and wrong," Crombie said yesterday. "She taught us that while ideas mattered, acting on them was important. And she added an ethical dimension."
Over the past two years, Jacobs has carried on her rants about the evils of city planners. Always, the audience listened with rapt attention.
The irony is, says former Star city columnist David Lewis Stein, an Annex neighbour, is that Jacobs' disciples violated one of the guru's principal tenets: avoid orthodoxy.
The idea of protecting neighbourhoods and the expansion of the business district into downtown neighbourhoods saved the downtown as a liveable metropolis. But the corollary is de-concentration. Now they call it urban sprawl.
"She gave us the value of the neighbourhood," Stein says. "What her disciples didn't do was build to the next stage ... how do you knit them together in a construct like the GTA?"
In May 2001 in Winnipeg, Jacobs painfully rose to an arching position, her white, out-of-place hair enhancing her legendary status, and addressed the mayors of Canada's five largest urban regions. It was the first meeting called to fertilize an embryonic movement for a new deal for cities.
In a broadside levelled at Ottawa and the provinces, Jacobs urged the unprecedented gathering of mayors to organize their nearly 6.5 million citizens in what amounted to a campaign to save the country.
Jacobs' monumental work is finished. Ours is just beginning.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826816&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - Column
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"Jacobs a thinker uncaring of laurels"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 06:23 AM
MARTIN KNELMAN
Friends and admirers of Jane Jacobs, the great urban visionary who died yesterday, would occasionally remark that it was a scandal she had never been recognized with the Order of Canada.
In fact she did receive it, about 10 years ago. But being Jane, she never talked about it, and rarely wore the pin.
Throughout her life, part of her guiding world view was that you should never trust authority or credentials.
Indeed, she was a true democrat, not in the political sense but by the nature of her soul. She never aspired to be Prof. Jacobs or Dr. Jacobs.
New acquaintances might call her Mrs. Jacobs, but to anyone who knew her, it was out of the question to call her anything but Jane.
One occasion when she did wear her Order of Canada pin was when she was invited to speak at the Canadian embassy in Washington. And it was mentioned by the man introducing her that she had turned down honorary degrees from 24 universities, including Harvard, Yale and University of Toronto.
Sid Adilman, the Star entertainment columnist for three decades who was a neighbour and dear friend of the most celebrated American ever to settle in the Annex, was with her on that occasion.
But when he reported the bit about the 24 honorary degrees, he was sharply corrected.
"It was only 12 honorary degrees," she insisted.
His excuse: he'd believed the introduction in Washington.
Her retort: "Don't."
Jane's reason for rejecting the gift-wrapped degrees: She had studied at Columbia but was not a university graduate, and she distrusted the academic mindset. She regarded universities as degree factories, and believed that giving out honorary degrees was their sneaky way of trying to own part of you.
Besides, she thought receiving honours was a distraction.
She preferred to be left alone so she could think and write. Interruptions, like phone calls, were ignored.
"Our families were friends for 35 years," Adilman recalled yesterday, "and we shared a lot of dinners and parties. Every time we sat down at the table, there would be a heated discussion about things going on in the city, and she would state very strong opinions. She could get pretty cranky if you argued with her, but then five minutes later she would apologize and ask whether she had hurt your feelings."
He saw a side of this lionized thinker that her fans didn't know. Both had been ordered by their doctors to do a lot of walking, and on Saturdays the two of them would take foot tours of different parts of Toronto, while she talked about the neighbourhood and style of the buildings.
She loved magic shows, especially those of David Ben, in a child-like way. She preferred not to know how the trick was done.
One thing this determined woman could not be accused of was living in the past. In the late 1990s, when Ric Burns did his seven-part, 14-hour PBS series on the history of New York, the former activist there turned down his request for an on-camera interview.
"Oh, that was ancient history," she explained when the call came from PBS. "I'm much more interested now in what's happening up here in Toronto where I live now."
Click.
Nevertheless, episode seven of the series contains amazing footage of Jacobs leading the 1960s revolt against New York parks commissioner Robert Moses and his plans for neighbourhood-destroying expressways to the suburbs. She never saw the show.
The last time we chatted, she was proud of having quit smoking at 88. But secretly, I heard later, when at the typewriter she'd sneak a cigarette.
She never wanted to retire from writing, or thinking. All else was a distraction. "My first loyalty is to curiosity," she told her son Ned not long ago.
But in the last few months, she was too ill to write.
For years Jane decreed that no one was to have a birthday party for her. But she would soften her position by saying when she turned 90, the ban would be lifted just once.
Friends and family had been looking forward to that occasion. May 4, 2006 was the date circled on their calendars.
mknelman@thestar.ca
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826434&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
*
"Jacobs a thinker uncaring of laurels"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 06:23 AM
MARTIN KNELMAN
Friends and admirers of Jane Jacobs, the great urban visionary who died yesterday, would occasionally remark that it was a scandal she had never been recognized with the Order of Canada.
In fact she did receive it, about 10 years ago. But being Jane, she never talked about it, and rarely wore the pin.
Throughout her life, part of her guiding world view was that you should never trust authority or credentials.
Indeed, she was a true democrat, not in the political sense but by the nature of her soul. She never aspired to be Prof. Jacobs or Dr. Jacobs.
New acquaintances might call her Mrs. Jacobs, but to anyone who knew her, it was out of the question to call her anything but Jane.
One occasion when she did wear her Order of Canada pin was when she was invited to speak at the Canadian embassy in Washington. And it was mentioned by the man introducing her that she had turned down honorary degrees from 24 universities, including Harvard, Yale and University of Toronto.
Sid Adilman, the Star entertainment columnist for three decades who was a neighbour and dear friend of the most celebrated American ever to settle in the Annex, was with her on that occasion.
But when he reported the bit about the 24 honorary degrees, he was sharply corrected.
"It was only 12 honorary degrees," she insisted.
His excuse: he'd believed the introduction in Washington.
Her retort: "Don't."
Jane's reason for rejecting the gift-wrapped degrees: She had studied at Columbia but was not a university graduate, and she distrusted the academic mindset. She regarded universities as degree factories, and believed that giving out honorary degrees was their sneaky way of trying to own part of you.
Besides, she thought receiving honours was a distraction.
She preferred to be left alone so she could think and write. Interruptions, like phone calls, were ignored.
"Our families were friends for 35 years," Adilman recalled yesterday, "and we shared a lot of dinners and parties. Every time we sat down at the table, there would be a heated discussion about things going on in the city, and she would state very strong opinions. She could get pretty cranky if you argued with her, but then five minutes later she would apologize and ask whether she had hurt your feelings."
He saw a side of this lionized thinker that her fans didn't know. Both had been ordered by their doctors to do a lot of walking, and on Saturdays the two of them would take foot tours of different parts of Toronto, while she talked about the neighbourhood and style of the buildings.
She loved magic shows, especially those of David Ben, in a child-like way. She preferred not to know how the trick was done.
One thing this determined woman could not be accused of was living in the past. In the late 1990s, when Ric Burns did his seven-part, 14-hour PBS series on the history of New York, the former activist there turned down his request for an on-camera interview.
"Oh, that was ancient history," she explained when the call came from PBS. "I'm much more interested now in what's happening up here in Toronto where I live now."
Click.
Nevertheless, episode seven of the series contains amazing footage of Jacobs leading the 1960s revolt against New York parks commissioner Robert Moses and his plans for neighbourhood-destroying expressways to the suburbs. She never saw the show.
The last time we chatted, she was proud of having quit smoking at 88. But secretly, I heard later, when at the typewriter she'd sneak a cigarette.
She never wanted to retire from writing, or thinking. All else was a distraction. "My first loyalty is to curiosity," she told her son Ned not long ago.
But in the last few months, she was too ill to write.
For years Jane decreed that no one was to have a birthday party for her. But she would soften her position by saying when she turned 90, the ban would be lifted just once.
Friends and family had been looking forward to that occasion. May 4, 2006 was the date circled on their calendars.
mknelman@thestar.ca
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826434&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - Editorial
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"Editorial: Toronto loses a friend"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM
EDITORIAL
With the death of Jane Jacobs yesterday, Toronto lost more than a writer, intellectual and urban activist. This city lost a faithful friend and a high-spirited defender.
Best known for her seminal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs was an early proponent of liveable communities, which valued people, parks and neighbourhoods above highways, high-rises and urban sprawl.
But she did more than think and write about urban issues. She fought for what she believed. After moving here from the United States in 1968, she helped stop the proposed Spadina Expressway from ripping through the Annex neighbourhood and she continued her writing to become a legendary urban philosopher.
Few people have accomplished so much. Jacobs would have turned 90 next week. Over decades of writing and vigorous activism she helped change the way people regard urban areas and, in the process, changed the way that cities are developed.
It is to Toronto's credit that, of all the cities in all the world, Jacobs chose to make this her home. Few residents will be missed as much.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001825313&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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"Editorial: Toronto loses a friend"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM
EDITORIAL
With the death of Jane Jacobs yesterday, Toronto lost more than a writer, intellectual and urban activist. This city lost a faithful friend and a high-spirited defender.
Best known for her seminal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs was an early proponent of liveable communities, which valued people, parks and neighbourhoods above highways, high-rises and urban sprawl.
But she did more than think and write about urban issues. She fought for what she believed. After moving here from the United States in 1968, she helped stop the proposed Spadina Expressway from ripping through the Annex neighbourhood and she continued her writing to become a legendary urban philosopher.
Few people have accomplished so much. Jacobs would have turned 90 next week. Over decades of writing and vigorous activism she helped change the way people regard urban areas and, in the process, changed the way that cities are developed.
It is to Toronto's credit that, of all the cities in all the world, Jacobs chose to make this her home. Few residents will be missed as much.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001825313&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - Op Ed
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"T.O. owes debt to Jacobs"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 08:03 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME
URBAN AFFAIRS COLUMNIST
More than most cities, Toronto owes a huge debt of gratitude to Jane Jacobs.
Jacobs, who died yesterday eight days short of her 90th birthday, loved this city almost as much as it loved her.
Even if she hadn't moved here from New York in 1968, she would have left this town a different place. But the mere fact of her presence, which the city wore like a badge of honour, ensured that her ideas were always close to the centre of any debate about the future of urbanism in Toronto.
Plain-spoken, utterly unpretentious, self-taught and full of sly humour, Jacobs was disarming in the directness of her opinions. She despised jargon and railed against experts, especially planners and politicians, whom she considered the cause of many of the problems that have plagued North American cities since the end of World War II.
In her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she did for urbanism what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environment. Though untrained in any formal sense — she studied neither urban planning nor architecture nor economics — Jacobs had the power of being able to see what was actually in front of her, rather than what she was told to see.
Indeed, she used to say she wrote Death And Life after having visited countless urban renewal projects in the 1950s that were never quite as their promoters described.
Of course, we live in an age when suburban sprawl has replaced city building as the dominant form of growth. Not even Jacobs could change that. But if nothing else, she forced us to question our headlong rush to remake the countryside in the image of a subdivision.
Don't forget that when Jacobs began her work, the experts were declaring that the city had no future. As the exodus from downtown grew ever more hectic, cities were expected to become wastelands abandoned to the poor, and in the U.S., to blacks. Though Canada avoided the worst of the "white flight" that left so many American cities hollowed out and decaying, it embraced suburbia with an enthusiasm that is now coming back to haunt us.
But Jacobs was also aware that cities lie at the heart of economic activity. Though Death And Life remains by far her best-known book, she went on in other volumes to explore how cities are economic engines as well as cultural generators and social integrators.
In The Economy of Cities and later Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs attempted to do to economic theory what she had done previously to urban planning theory in her first tome, namely, turn it on its head. Though neither work has received as much recognition, there have been signs recently that that, too, is starting to change.
Jacobs' argument is that conventional economic thinking from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman has consistently failed to account for the hugely significant role cities play in economic prosperity.
Just as she rejected an urban planning approach that would divide all human activities into separate compartments — a place each to live, work, play and shop — she threw out several centuries of economic science, which, she stated flatly, is a "delusion."
Though untrained, Jacobs based her arguments on the evidence of what she saw. This is what made her so profoundly persuasive. Where the vast majority of planners, economists and the like accept what they are told, are little more than founts of conventional wisdom, Jacobs questioned every assumption.
She had the kind of old-fashioned Yankee skepticism that Mark Twain mythologized. She would say that she learned everything she needed to know from her Grade 6 teacher back in Scranton, Pa.
Though she was never rude, posturing or confrontational, she wouldn't hesitate to tell a room full of professionals precisely why they were wrong. And she was just as likely to call her supporters to account as her critics.
At one convention, organized in Toronto by a group of admirers, she listened to a delegation from China as they talked about how her books had influenced a housing scheme for migrant workers. Jacobs responded politely but made it clear the project was a complete misrepresentation of her ideas.
In her last volume, Dark Age Ahead (2004), Jacobs warned against nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it. Typically, she relied on the kind of quiet, inexorable logic that made her impossible to ignore.
"The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others," she wrote, "making it more likely that others will give way. With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely, until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses."
There's still time to change, she argued, but not much.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826938&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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"T.O. owes debt to Jacobs"
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 08:03 AM
CHRISTOPHER HUME
URBAN AFFAIRS COLUMNIST
More than most cities, Toronto owes a huge debt of gratitude to Jane Jacobs.
Jacobs, who died yesterday eight days short of her 90th birthday, loved this city almost as much as it loved her.
Even if she hadn't moved here from New York in 1968, she would have left this town a different place. But the mere fact of her presence, which the city wore like a badge of honour, ensured that her ideas were always close to the centre of any debate about the future of urbanism in Toronto.
Plain-spoken, utterly unpretentious, self-taught and full of sly humour, Jacobs was disarming in the directness of her opinions. She despised jargon and railed against experts, especially planners and politicians, whom she considered the cause of many of the problems that have plagued North American cities since the end of World War II.
In her seminal 1961 work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she did for urbanism what Rachel Carson's Silent Spring did for the environment. Though untrained in any formal sense — she studied neither urban planning nor architecture nor economics — Jacobs had the power of being able to see what was actually in front of her, rather than what she was told to see.
Indeed, she used to say she wrote Death And Life after having visited countless urban renewal projects in the 1950s that were never quite as their promoters described.
Of course, we live in an age when suburban sprawl has replaced city building as the dominant form of growth. Not even Jacobs could change that. But if nothing else, she forced us to question our headlong rush to remake the countryside in the image of a subdivision.
Don't forget that when Jacobs began her work, the experts were declaring that the city had no future. As the exodus from downtown grew ever more hectic, cities were expected to become wastelands abandoned to the poor, and in the U.S., to blacks. Though Canada avoided the worst of the "white flight" that left so many American cities hollowed out and decaying, it embraced suburbia with an enthusiasm that is now coming back to haunt us.
But Jacobs was also aware that cities lie at the heart of economic activity. Though Death And Life remains by far her best-known book, she went on in other volumes to explore how cities are economic engines as well as cultural generators and social integrators.
In The Economy of Cities and later Cities and the Wealth of Nations, Jacobs attempted to do to economic theory what she had done previously to urban planning theory in her first tome, namely, turn it on its head. Though neither work has received as much recognition, there have been signs recently that that, too, is starting to change.
Jacobs' argument is that conventional economic thinking from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman has consistently failed to account for the hugely significant role cities play in economic prosperity.
Just as she rejected an urban planning approach that would divide all human activities into separate compartments — a place each to live, work, play and shop — she threw out several centuries of economic science, which, she stated flatly, is a "delusion."
Though untrained, Jacobs based her arguments on the evidence of what she saw. This is what made her so profoundly persuasive. Where the vast majority of planners, economists and the like accept what they are told, are little more than founts of conventional wisdom, Jacobs questioned every assumption.
She had the kind of old-fashioned Yankee skepticism that Mark Twain mythologized. She would say that she learned everything she needed to know from her Grade 6 teacher back in Scranton, Pa.
Though she was never rude, posturing or confrontational, she wouldn't hesitate to tell a room full of professionals precisely why they were wrong. And she was just as likely to call her supporters to account as her critics.
At one convention, organized in Toronto by a group of admirers, she listened to a delegation from China as they talked about how her books had influenced a housing scheme for migrant workers. Jacobs responded politely but made it clear the project was a complete misrepresentation of her ideas.
In her last volume, Dark Age Ahead (2004), Jacobs warned against nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it. Typically, she relied on the kind of quiet, inexorable logic that made her impossible to ignore.
"The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others," she wrote, "making it more likely that others will give way. With each collapse, still further ruin becomes more likely, until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses."
There's still time to change, she argued, but not much.
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826938&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - An Appreciation
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"She wrote the book on cities"
(Photo, Toronto Star)
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM
WARREN GERARD
TORONTO STAR
Jane Jacobs was an urban fable.
She was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Jacobs died yesterday in a Toronto hospital. She was 89. Her 90th birthday would have been next week.
An American who chose to be Canadian, Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.
Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel on the west contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the western part of Greenwich Village.
In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.
Toronto Mayor David Miller, who called Jacobs both a friend and a mentor, interrupted yesterday's city council meeting to announce to his colleagues that Jacobs had died.
"The power of her ideas is what helped make this city choose a different path, a path where you have vibrant downtown neighbourhoods where people could live, a path where you didn't have expressways cutting through neighbourhoods," Miller told reporters.
"She gave me all sorts of advice over time. The way she gave you advice was she invited you over for tea. And you had tea and you talked and if you were smart, you kept quiet and you listened because you could really learn from Jane Jacobs."
Her son, Ned Jacobs, said in an interview from Vancouver that his mother had been in hospital for a few days.
"She died of old age. She just wore out," he said. "Every part of her was worn out. She was working as best she could right to the end."
Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the "foot people."
It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential highrise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances and desolate downtowns.
She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, lowrise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.
Former Toronto mayor David Crombie said that while people see her as a city builder, affecting the city form, her impact was much bigger and deeper.
"The most important thing she did for me and us was remind us that ideas matter, and the ideas that were most important are the ones that mattered to us," Crombie said. "She also believed you take action. You don't have ideas and go away. There is a direct connection of thought and action."
Jacobs, born May 4, 1916, grew up in Scranton, the centre of Pennsylvania coal country.
"I came from a family where women had worked, mostly as schoolteachers, for quite a few generations. I had a great-aunt who went to Alaska and taught Indians. My mother had worked as a schoolteacher, then a nurse. She became the night supervising nurse at an important hospital in Philadelphia," she was quoted.
"Those were traditional women's occupations, to be sure. But I did grow up with the idea that women could do things, and in my own family I was treated much the same as my brothers."
Finishing high school, she trained as a stenographer but got an unpaid job as a reporter at the local newspaper. Jacobs moved to New York City in the Depression years and wrote a few articles for Vogue.
Then, at age 22, she went to Columbia University, but that didn't last and after two years she returned to writing.
She married Robert Jacobs in 1944. He was an architect and it was his work that got her interested in Architectural Forum, a monthly magazine, where after a short time she went to work, becoming a senior editor.
In 1958, after writing about downtowns for Fortune magazine, Mrs. Jacobs received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to write about cities.
In 1968, Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto. They didn't want their two draft-age sons, Jim and Ned, to serve in the Vietnam War.
Toronto was ripe for Jacobs. She wasn't here long before plans were revealed to build the Spadina Expressway, which promised to cut a strip through the city, making it easier for suburbanites to commute in and out of the downtown. She wrote a newspaper article highly critical of city planners for their vision to "Los Angelize" what she described as "the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options."
In an unrequited sentiment, odd as it might seem, planners adored Jacobs. She described them this way, however. "First of all, our official planning departments seem to be brain-dead in the sense that we cannot depend on them in any way, shape or form for providing intellectual leadership in addressing urgent problems involving the physical future of the city."
Jacobs galvanized local citizens against the planners and politicians in what became known as the Stop Spadina movement.
For the most part, Jacobs' books were an intellectual progression, each taking her thoughts on cities and economies a step further.
Paul Bedford, retired Toronto chief planner, said Jacobs had been a key supporter of the radical plan in the mid-'90s to relax planning rules to spur new ideas in the King-Spadina and King-Parliament areas that were formerly industrial and in decline.
Bedford credited Jacobs for encouraging him to take risks and experiment.
"We abolished the density numbers, the land use designations and put in place an urban design framework. Really it was about encouraging re-use of buildings and opening up the uses to allow residential.
"I remember her words specifically, to me and to Barbara (Hall): She said this must work. You must be successful at this and get it right.
"She gave me the notion as chief planner that I had to take the lead, be visible, communicate with the people on all fronts. It was to bring planning to the people and demystify it. It gave me the courage to be an agent of change rather than an agent of the bureaucracy."
As well as The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and The Question of Separatism, Jacobs wrote other books including Cities and the Wealth of Nations; Systems of Survival: A Dialogue; A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska; The Nature of Economies and Dark Age Ahead.
Following the death of her husband, Jacobs continued to live in her three-storey brick house on Albany Ave., a tree-lined street in the Annex neighbourhood she helped preserve.
She wrote in an upstairs office on a typewriter, refusing to use a computer. Her son, Jim, an inventor, lived close by and another son, Ned, worked for the Vancouver Parks Board and is a musician. Her daughter, Burgin, is an artist and lives in New Denver, B.C.
The shelves of her study were filled with books on chaos theory and the sciences, subjects that stimulated her own thinking.
Shortly after writing The Nature of Economies, she was quoted as saying: "I think I'm living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line cause and effect. Things are connected by webs.
"This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences, and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of things we haven't understood before. I think it's very exciting."
As for her own life, she said the following: "Really, I've had a very easy life.
"By easy I don't mean just lying around, but I haven't been put upon, really. And it's been luck mostly. Being brought up in a time when women weren't put down, that's luck. Being in a family where I wasn't put down, that's luck. Finding the right man to marry, that's the best luck! Having nice children, healthy children, that's luck.
"All these lucky things."
with files from paul moloney, royson james and vanessa lu
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826801&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"She wrote the book on cities"
(Photo, Toronto Star)
Wednesday, April 26, 2006, 01:00 AM
WARREN GERARD
TORONTO STAR
Jane Jacobs was an urban fable.
She was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Jacobs died yesterday in a Toronto hospital. She was 89. Her 90th birthday would have been next week.
An American who chose to be Canadian, Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.
Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland Tunnel on the west contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the western part of Greenwich Village.
In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.
Toronto Mayor David Miller, who called Jacobs both a friend and a mentor, interrupted yesterday's city council meeting to announce to his colleagues that Jacobs had died.
"The power of her ideas is what helped make this city choose a different path, a path where you have vibrant downtown neighbourhoods where people could live, a path where you didn't have expressways cutting through neighbourhoods," Miller told reporters.
"She gave me all sorts of advice over time. The way she gave you advice was she invited you over for tea. And you had tea and you talked and if you were smart, you kept quiet and you listened because you could really learn from Jane Jacobs."
Her son, Ned Jacobs, said in an interview from Vancouver that his mother had been in hospital for a few days.
"She died of old age. She just wore out," he said. "Every part of her was worn out. She was working as best she could right to the end."
Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the "foot people."
It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential highrise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances and desolate downtowns.
She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, lowrise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.
Former Toronto mayor David Crombie said that while people see her as a city builder, affecting the city form, her impact was much bigger and deeper.
"The most important thing she did for me and us was remind us that ideas matter, and the ideas that were most important are the ones that mattered to us," Crombie said. "She also believed you take action. You don't have ideas and go away. There is a direct connection of thought and action."
Jacobs, born May 4, 1916, grew up in Scranton, the centre of Pennsylvania coal country.
"I came from a family where women had worked, mostly as schoolteachers, for quite a few generations. I had a great-aunt who went to Alaska and taught Indians. My mother had worked as a schoolteacher, then a nurse. She became the night supervising nurse at an important hospital in Philadelphia," she was quoted.
"Those were traditional women's occupations, to be sure. But I did grow up with the idea that women could do things, and in my own family I was treated much the same as my brothers."
Finishing high school, she trained as a stenographer but got an unpaid job as a reporter at the local newspaper. Jacobs moved to New York City in the Depression years and wrote a few articles for Vogue.
Then, at age 22, she went to Columbia University, but that didn't last and after two years she returned to writing.
She married Robert Jacobs in 1944. He was an architect and it was his work that got her interested in Architectural Forum, a monthly magazine, where after a short time she went to work, becoming a senior editor.
'I think I'm living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring' -- Jane JacobsTheirs was a close relationship and a happy marriage. It was to last for 52 years before he died of lung cancer at Toronto's Princess Margaret Hospital, a hospital he had designed.
In 1958, after writing about downtowns for Fortune magazine, Mrs. Jacobs received a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to write about cities.
In 1968, Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto. They didn't want their two draft-age sons, Jim and Ned, to serve in the Vietnam War.
Toronto was ripe for Jacobs. She wasn't here long before plans were revealed to build the Spadina Expressway, which promised to cut a strip through the city, making it easier for suburbanites to commute in and out of the downtown. She wrote a newspaper article highly critical of city planners for their vision to "Los Angelize" what she described as "the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options."
In an unrequited sentiment, odd as it might seem, planners adored Jacobs. She described them this way, however. "First of all, our official planning departments seem to be brain-dead in the sense that we cannot depend on them in any way, shape or form for providing intellectual leadership in addressing urgent problems involving the physical future of the city."
Jacobs galvanized local citizens against the planners and politicians in what became known as the Stop Spadina movement.
For the most part, Jacobs' books were an intellectual progression, each taking her thoughts on cities and economies a step further.
Paul Bedford, retired Toronto chief planner, said Jacobs had been a key supporter of the radical plan in the mid-'90s to relax planning rules to spur new ideas in the King-Spadina and King-Parliament areas that were formerly industrial and in decline.
Bedford credited Jacobs for encouraging him to take risks and experiment.
"We abolished the density numbers, the land use designations and put in place an urban design framework. Really it was about encouraging re-use of buildings and opening up the uses to allow residential.
"I remember her words specifically, to me and to Barbara (Hall): She said this must work. You must be successful at this and get it right.
"She gave me the notion as chief planner that I had to take the lead, be visible, communicate with the people on all fronts. It was to bring planning to the people and demystify it. It gave me the courage to be an agent of change rather than an agent of the bureaucracy."
As well as The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and The Question of Separatism, Jacobs wrote other books including Cities and the Wealth of Nations; Systems of Survival: A Dialogue; A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska; The Nature of Economies and Dark Age Ahead.
Following the death of her husband, Jacobs continued to live in her three-storey brick house on Albany Ave., a tree-lined street in the Annex neighbourhood she helped preserve.
She wrote in an upstairs office on a typewriter, refusing to use a computer. Her son, Jim, an inventor, lived close by and another son, Ned, worked for the Vancouver Parks Board and is a musician. Her daughter, Burgin, is an artist and lives in New Denver, B.C.
The shelves of her study were filled with books on chaos theory and the sciences, subjects that stimulated her own thinking.
Shortly after writing The Nature of Economies, she was quoted as saying: "I think I'm living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line cause and effect. Things are connected by webs.
"This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences, and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of things we haven't understood before. I think it's very exciting."
As for her own life, she said the following: "Really, I've had a very easy life.
"By easy I don't mean just lying around, but I haven't been put upon, really. And it's been luck mostly. Being brought up in a time when women weren't put down, that's luck. Being in a family where I wasn't put down, that's luck. Finding the right man to marry, that's the best luck! Having nice children, healthy children, that's luck.
"All these lucky things."
with files from paul moloney, royson james and vanessa lu
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1146001826801&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
Toronto Star - Jane Jacobs - Obituary
*
"Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban crusader"
(Photo, Toronto Star)
Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 06:08 PM
WARREN GERARD
TORONTO STAR
Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Mrs. Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was 89.
An American who chose to be Canadian, Mrs. Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.
Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland tunnel on the west ended contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the west side of Greenwich Village.
In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.
Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the “foot people”.
It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential high-rise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances, and desolate downtowns.
She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, low-rise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.
Not everyone agreed. Her arch-critic, Lewis Mumford, called her vision “higgledy-piggledy unplanned casualness.”
Mrs. Jacobs was seen by many of her supporters — mistakenly — as left-wing. Not so.
Her views embraced the marketplace, supported privatization of utilities, frowned on subsidies, and detested the intrusions of government, big or small.
Nor was she right-wing. In fact, she had no time for ideology.
“I think ideologies, no matter what kind, are one of the greatest afflictions because they blind us to seeing what’s going on or what’s being done,’’ she was quoted.
“I’m kind of an atheist,” she said. “As for being a rightist or a leftist, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I think ideologies are blinders.”
Mrs. Jacobs scorned nationalism and argued in her 1980 book, The Question of Separatism, that Quebec would be better off leaving Canada. Moreover, she argued that some cities would be better off as independent economic and political units.
Her view of cities startled long-held perceptions. In her 1969 book, The Economy of Cities, Mrs. Jacobs challenged the dogma of agricultural primacy and created a debate on both the economic growth and stagnation of cities.
“Current theory in many fields — economics, history, anthropology — assumed that cities are built upon a rural economic base,’’ she wrote.
“If my observations and reasonings are correct, the reverse is true: that is rural economies, including agricultural work, are directly built upon city economies and city work.”
“For me,” John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto recalled, “the most significant influence was in terms of the notion that cities drive economies, not provincial or national governments.”
“She’s the one who propagated the thought, and I think she’s dead right.” Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago — the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics — liked Mrs. Jacob’s theories.
“I like her style,” he was quoted. “That kind of stepping back from facts and asking, what kind of economics produced this idea, is just a natural thing for an economist to do. I think everybody in economics finds her work very congenial for that reason.’’
Mrs. Jacobs was no expert, bare of established credentials had limited formal education, but was a member of that wonderful school of amateurs — American writers who were observers, critics and original thinkers, including such names as Paul Goodman, William H. Whyte, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan and Ralph Nader.
Mrs. Jacobs, born May 4, 1916, grew up in Scranton, the center of Pennsylvania coal country.
Scranton may well have sparked Mrs. Jacob’s life-long interest in cities and how they work. It provided “a template of how a city stagnates and declines and may be part of the reason why that subject interested me so much, because I came from a city where that happened.” she was quoted.
“I think I was rather fortunate in having wonderful school teachers in the first and second grade. They taught me almost everything I knew in school.
“From the third grade on, I’m sorry to say, they were nice people, but they were dopes.’”
“I came from a family where women had worked, mostly as schoolteachers, for quite a few generations. I had a great-aunt who went to Alaska and taught Indians. My mother had worked as a schoolteacher, then a nurse; she became the night supervising nurse at an important hospital in Philadelphia,” she was quoted.
“Those were traditional women’s occupations, to be sure. But I did grow up with the idea that women could do things, and in my own family I was treated much the same as my brothers.”
Finishing high school, she trained as a stenographer but got an unpaid job as a reporter at the local newspaper. Mrs. Jacobs moved to New York City in the Depression years and wrote a few articles for Vogue.
Then, at age 22, she went to Columbia University, but that didn’t last and after two years she returned to writing. She never embraced an institutional affiliation.
David Crombie, a former may or of Toronto, described Mrs. Jacobs as a “Harvard refusenik.”
In fact, according to Crombie, she had been offered more than 30 honourary degrees and turned them all down.
“It just wasn’t her style,” Crombie said. “She didn’t see that as what she was about.”
She married Robert Jacobs in 1944. He was an architect and it was his work that got her interest in Architectural Forum, a monthly magazine, where after a short time she went to work, becoming a senior editor.
Theirs was a close relationship and a happy marriage. It was to last for 52 years before he died of lung cancer at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, a hospital he had designed.
In 1958, after writing about downtowns for Fortune magazine, Mrs. Jacobs received a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to write about cities. At the same time, she was creating havoc with developers, planners and politicians who wanted to put a highway through New York City.
Jason Epstein, her long-time editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, recalled that the proposed expressway had nothing to do with moving traffic. “It would be devastating to the city,” he said.
“The reason to build it was that it was eligible for federal highway funds because it connected New Jersey to New York.
“It meant jobs for the construction industry, lots of money for politicians and architects who benefit from those things, and probably for real estate developers who would pick up on the fringes.
“It took 12 years for Jane to finally stop this thing,” Epstein recalled. “She was arrested at one point and charged with a couple of felonies and was in serious trouble. At one point she was thrown in jail.”
In 1968, Mrs. Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto. They didn’t want their two draft-age sons, Jim and Ned, to serve in the Vietnam war.
“It never occurred to me that I would ever be anything else but American,” she was quoted. But that changed when she took part in a march on the Pentagon in 1967 and found herself facing 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. … After a certain amount of time passed, I decided, well, that’s it. … I fell out of love with my country. It sounds ridiculous, but I didn’t feel a part of America anymore.”
Toronto was ripe for Mrs. Jacobs. She wasn’t here long before plans were revealed to build the Spadina Expressway, which promised to cut a strip through the city, making it easier for suburbanites to commute in and out of the downtown. She wrote a newspaper article highly critical of city planners for their vision to ‘Los Angelize’ what she described as “the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.”
In an unrequited sentiment, odd as it might seem, planners adored Jacobs. She described them this way, however. “First of all, our official planning departments seem to be brain-dead in the sense that we cannot depend on them in any way, shape or form for providing intellectual leadership in addressing urgent problems involving the physical future of the city.”
Mrs. Jacobs galvanized local citizens against the planners and politicians in what became known as the Stop Spadina movement.
“She really enjoyed the activist part,” Crombie recalled, “the strategy, the being on the streets, being at the meetings. She enjoyed meeting people, she enjoyed the vigour of activism.”
That was one facet of Mrs. Jacob’s character. Another, as Crombie put it, was Jane the ethicist.
“She had a terrific sense of the moral order,’’ he said. “She had the moral authority of an Old Testament prophet and the easy authority of a mother superior.”
For the most part, Mrs. Jacob’s books were an intellectual progression, each taking her thoughts on cities and economies a step further.
“She moved beyond planning to look at the city as economic generator,” commented Christopher Hume, urban affairs writer for The Star.
“Eschewing jargon and received wisdom, she possessed an extraordinary clarity of mind that enabled her to reveal truths so obvious they were in visible to the rest of the world.”
Epstein, the New York book editor who discovered Mrs. Jacobs as a writer of books, described her as a “shrewd” woman.
“She had that wonderful double view, trusting no one side, and suspicious of the other, which she had every reason to be. It made her mind very complex, extremely clear, strong and vigourous.”
As well as The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and The Question of Separatism, Mrs. Jacobs wrote other books, including: Cities and the Wealth of Nations; The Girl on the Hat, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue; A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska; The Hannah Breece Story; The Nature of Economies; and Dark Age Ahead.
Mrs. Jacobs was taken aback that her book The Question of Separatism was not well received by some Canadians. She wrote that Quebec would be better off and more vital economy outside of Canada.
“I don’t turn up my nose at people feeling emotional about things,” she was quoted.
“Emotion is valid. But I’m surprised at how emotional people get about Quebec.”
Her story of A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska is a book about her great aunt in turn-of-the century Alaska. The Girl on the Hat, written for her grand child, Caitlin, is the story of a resourceful girl named Tina who is two inches tall.
The central premise of her book, The Nature of Economies, is that economics is a web of connected forces subject to the same laws as all other living things in nature.
At the time in March, 2000, she told The Star’s Judy Stoffman: “This will be a radical idea to those who think of human beings as being outside nature. Human beings are neither adversaries of or the inevitable masters of nature. They live by the same processes as all nature.”
Following the death of her husband, Mrs. Jacobs continued to live in her three-storey brick house on Albany Ave., a tree-lined street in the Annex neighbourhood she helped preserve.
She wrote in an upstairs office on a typewriter, refusing to use a computer. A son, Jim, an inventor, lived close by and another son, Ned, worked for the Vancouver Parks Board and is a musician, and a daughter Burgin, is an artist and lives in New Denver. B.C.
The shelves of her study were not filled with books about economics or cities, but with writings on chaos theory and the sciences, subjects which stimulated her own thinking.
Shortly after writing The Nature of Economies, she was quoted as saying: “I think I’m living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line cause and effect; things are connected by webs.
“This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences, and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of things we haven’t understood before. I think it’s very exciting.”
As for her own life, she said the following: “Really, I’ve had a very easy life.
“By easy I don’t mean just lying around, but I haven’t been put upon, really. And it’s been luck mostly. Being brought up in a time when women weren’t put down, that’s luck. Being in a family where I wasn’t put down, that’s luck. Finding the right man to marry, that’s the best luck! Having nice children, healthy children, that’s luck.
“All these lucky things.”
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1145976509962&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Jane Jacobs, 89: Urban crusader"
(Photo, Toronto Star)
Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 06:08 PM
WARREN GERARD
TORONTO STAR
Jane Jacobs was a writer, intellectual, analyst, ethicist and moral thinker, activist, self-made economist, and a fearless critic of inflexible authority.
Mrs. Jacobs died this morning in Toronto. She was 89.
An American who chose to be Canadian, Mrs. Jacobs was a leader in the fights to preserve neighbourhoods and kill expressways, first in New York City, and then in Toronto.
Her efforts to stop the proposed expressway between Manhattan Bridge on east Manhattan and the Holland tunnel on the west ended contributed toward saving SoHo, Chinatown, and the west side of Greenwich Village.
In Toronto, her leadership galvanized the movement that stopped the proposed Spadina Expressway. It would have cut a swath through the lively Annex neighbourhood and parts of the downtown.
Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, became a bible for neighbourhood organizers and what she termed the “foot people”.
It made the case against the utopian planning culture of the times — residential high-rise development, expressways through city hearts, slum clearances, and desolate downtowns.
She believed that residential and commercial activity should be in the same place, that the safest neighbourhoods teem with life, short winding streets are better than long straight ones, low-rise housing is better than impersonal towers, that a neighbourhood is where people talk to one another. She liked the small-scale.
Not everyone agreed. Her arch-critic, Lewis Mumford, called her vision “higgledy-piggledy unplanned casualness.”
Mrs. Jacobs was seen by many of her supporters — mistakenly — as left-wing. Not so.
Her views embraced the marketplace, supported privatization of utilities, frowned on subsidies, and detested the intrusions of government, big or small.
Nor was she right-wing. In fact, she had no time for ideology.
“I think ideologies, no matter what kind, are one of the greatest afflictions because they blind us to seeing what’s going on or what’s being done,’’ she was quoted.
“I’m kind of an atheist,” she said. “As for being a rightist or a leftist, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I think ideologies are blinders.”
Mrs. Jacobs scorned nationalism and argued in her 1980 book, The Question of Separatism, that Quebec would be better off leaving Canada. Moreover, she argued that some cities would be better off as independent economic and political units.
Her view of cities startled long-held perceptions. In her 1969 book, The Economy of Cities, Mrs. Jacobs challenged the dogma of agricultural primacy and created a debate on both the economic growth and stagnation of cities.
“Current theory in many fields — economics, history, anthropology — assumed that cities are built upon a rural economic base,’’ she wrote.
“If my observations and reasonings are correct, the reverse is true: that is rural economies, including agricultural work, are directly built upon city economies and city work.”
“For me,” John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto recalled, “the most significant influence was in terms of the notion that cities drive economies, not provincial or national governments.”
“She’s the one who propagated the thought, and I think she’s dead right.” Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago — the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics — liked Mrs. Jacob’s theories.
“I like her style,” he was quoted. “That kind of stepping back from facts and asking, what kind of economics produced this idea, is just a natural thing for an economist to do. I think everybody in economics finds her work very congenial for that reason.’’
Mrs. Jacobs was no expert, bare of established credentials had limited formal education, but was a member of that wonderful school of amateurs — American writers who were observers, critics and original thinkers, including such names as Paul Goodman, William H. Whyte, Rachel Carson, Betty Friedan and Ralph Nader.
Mrs. Jacobs, born May 4, 1916, grew up in Scranton, the center of Pennsylvania coal country.
Scranton may well have sparked Mrs. Jacob’s life-long interest in cities and how they work. It provided “a template of how a city stagnates and declines and may be part of the reason why that subject interested me so much, because I came from a city where that happened.” she was quoted.
“I think I was rather fortunate in having wonderful school teachers in the first and second grade. They taught me almost everything I knew in school.
“From the third grade on, I’m sorry to say, they were nice people, but they were dopes.’”
“I came from a family where women had worked, mostly as schoolteachers, for quite a few generations. I had a great-aunt who went to Alaska and taught Indians. My mother had worked as a schoolteacher, then a nurse; she became the night supervising nurse at an important hospital in Philadelphia,” she was quoted.
“Those were traditional women’s occupations, to be sure. But I did grow up with the idea that women could do things, and in my own family I was treated much the same as my brothers.”
Finishing high school, she trained as a stenographer but got an unpaid job as a reporter at the local newspaper. Mrs. Jacobs moved to New York City in the Depression years and wrote a few articles for Vogue.
Then, at age 22, she went to Columbia University, but that didn’t last and after two years she returned to writing. She never embraced an institutional affiliation.
David Crombie, a former may or of Toronto, described Mrs. Jacobs as a “Harvard refusenik.”
In fact, according to Crombie, she had been offered more than 30 honourary degrees and turned them all down.
“It just wasn’t her style,” Crombie said. “She didn’t see that as what she was about.”
She married Robert Jacobs in 1944. He was an architect and it was his work that got her interest in Architectural Forum, a monthly magazine, where after a short time she went to work, becoming a senior editor.
Theirs was a close relationship and a happy marriage. It was to last for 52 years before he died of lung cancer at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Hospital, a hospital he had designed.
In 1958, after writing about downtowns for Fortune magazine, Mrs. Jacobs received a grant from The Rockefeller Foundation to write about cities. At the same time, she was creating havoc with developers, planners and politicians who wanted to put a highway through New York City.
Jason Epstein, her long-time editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, recalled that the proposed expressway had nothing to do with moving traffic. “It would be devastating to the city,” he said.
“The reason to build it was that it was eligible for federal highway funds because it connected New Jersey to New York.
“It meant jobs for the construction industry, lots of money for politicians and architects who benefit from those things, and probably for real estate developers who would pick up on the fringes.
“It took 12 years for Jane to finally stop this thing,” Epstein recalled. “She was arrested at one point and charged with a couple of felonies and was in serious trouble. At one point she was thrown in jail.”
In 1968, Mrs. Jacobs and her family moved to Toronto. They didn’t want their two draft-age sons, Jim and Ned, to serve in the Vietnam war.
“It never occurred to me that I would ever be anything else but American,” she was quoted. But that changed when she took part in a march on the Pentagon in 1967 and found herself facing 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. … After a certain amount of time passed, I decided, well, that’s it. … I fell out of love with my country. It sounds ridiculous, but I didn’t feel a part of America anymore.”
Toronto was ripe for Mrs. Jacobs. She wasn’t here long before plans were revealed to build the Spadina Expressway, which promised to cut a strip through the city, making it easier for suburbanites to commute in and out of the downtown. She wrote a newspaper article highly critical of city planners for their vision to ‘Los Angelize’ what she described as “the most hopeful and healthy city in North America, still unmangled, still with options.”
In an unrequited sentiment, odd as it might seem, planners adored Jacobs. She described them this way, however. “First of all, our official planning departments seem to be brain-dead in the sense that we cannot depend on them in any way, shape or form for providing intellectual leadership in addressing urgent problems involving the physical future of the city.”
Mrs. Jacobs galvanized local citizens against the planners and politicians in what became known as the Stop Spadina movement.
“She really enjoyed the activist part,” Crombie recalled, “the strategy, the being on the streets, being at the meetings. She enjoyed meeting people, she enjoyed the vigour of activism.”
That was one facet of Mrs. Jacob’s character. Another, as Crombie put it, was Jane the ethicist.
“She had a terrific sense of the moral order,’’ he said. “She had the moral authority of an Old Testament prophet and the easy authority of a mother superior.”
For the most part, Mrs. Jacob’s books were an intellectual progression, each taking her thoughts on cities and economies a step further.
“She moved beyond planning to look at the city as economic generator,” commented Christopher Hume, urban affairs writer for The Star.
“Eschewing jargon and received wisdom, she possessed an extraordinary clarity of mind that enabled her to reveal truths so obvious they were in visible to the rest of the world.”
Epstein, the New York book editor who discovered Mrs. Jacobs as a writer of books, described her as a “shrewd” woman.
“She had that wonderful double view, trusting no one side, and suspicious of the other, which she had every reason to be. It made her mind very complex, extremely clear, strong and vigourous.”
As well as The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Economy of Cities, and The Question of Separatism, Mrs. Jacobs wrote other books, including: Cities and the Wealth of Nations; The Girl on the Hat, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue; A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska; The Hannah Breece Story; The Nature of Economies; and Dark Age Ahead.
Mrs. Jacobs was taken aback that her book The Question of Separatism was not well received by some Canadians. She wrote that Quebec would be better off and more vital economy outside of Canada.
“I don’t turn up my nose at people feeling emotional about things,” she was quoted.
“Emotion is valid. But I’m surprised at how emotional people get about Quebec.”
Her story of A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska is a book about her great aunt in turn-of-the century Alaska. The Girl on the Hat, written for her grand child, Caitlin, is the story of a resourceful girl named Tina who is two inches tall.
The central premise of her book, The Nature of Economies, is that economics is a web of connected forces subject to the same laws as all other living things in nature.
At the time in March, 2000, she told The Star’s Judy Stoffman: “This will be a radical idea to those who think of human beings as being outside nature. Human beings are neither adversaries of or the inevitable masters of nature. They live by the same processes as all nature.”
Following the death of her husband, Mrs. Jacobs continued to live in her three-storey brick house on Albany Ave., a tree-lined street in the Annex neighbourhood she helped preserve.
She wrote in an upstairs office on a typewriter, refusing to use a computer. A son, Jim, an inventor, lived close by and another son, Ned, worked for the Vancouver Parks Board and is a musician, and a daughter Burgin, is an artist and lives in New Denver. B.C.
The shelves of her study were not filled with books about economics or cities, but with writings on chaos theory and the sciences, subjects which stimulated her own thinking.
Shortly after writing The Nature of Economies, she was quoted as saying: “I think I’m living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line cause and effect; things are connected by webs.
“This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences, and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of things we haven’t understood before. I think it’s very exciting.”
As for her own life, she said the following: “Really, I’ve had a very easy life.
“By easy I don’t mean just lying around, but I haven’t been put upon, really. And it’s been luck mostly. Being brought up in a time when women weren’t put down, that’s luck. Being in a family where I wasn’t put down, that’s luck. Finding the right man to marry, that’s the best luck! Having nice children, healthy children, that’s luck.
“All these lucky things.”
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1145976509962&call_pageid=971358637177
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
Toronto Globe and Mail - Jane Jacobs - Early Breaking News
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"Jane Jacobs"
(Photo, Toronto Globe and Mail)
Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 1:52 PM
SANDRA MARTIN
Globe and Mail Update
Jane Jacobs, the urban expert and social activist who wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died Tuesday morning at Toronto Western Hospital after about a year of up and down health problems.
She was taken to Toronto Western Hospital on Saturday after having suffered what appeared to be a stroke.
The American-born Canadian was 89 years. She was considered one of the most influential critics of urban planning.
As a public speaker she was feisty and outspoken, 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 issues. 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.
A free thinker, who loathed the modern tendency to credentialism, she took on the rigid thinking of post-war urban thinkers in her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She believed implicitly that there was no such thing as a straight line in the way people thought, or in the way people lived. Even the smallest organism is affected by many different stimuli, so it is impossible to predict behaviour with any accuracy.
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. She arrived in Toronto and almost immediately became embroiled in desperate struggles between 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.
Many people tried to label her, calling her everything from an amateur to an economist. She hated being pinned down, but the designation she allowed was urbanologist, a thinker about cities.
In the course of a long life she wrote several major books including, The Economy of Cities (1969) The Wealth of Nations (1984), a controversial book advocating Quebec sovereignty. The Question of Separatism (1980), Systems of Survival (1992) The Nature of Economies (2000) and Dark Age Ahead (2005).
Intensely private, she disliked public attention focused on her, rather than the causes she espoused. A dozen institutions offered her honourary degrees, but she turned them all down, because she feared that in accepting their accolades, she would have to give up something of herself for fundraising purposes. What she wanted, as she approached her 90th birthday this May, was more time for thinking and writing and being with family.
When she was appointed as an officer to the Order of Canada in 1996, her citation said "her seminal writings and thought-provoking commentaries on urban development have had a tremendous effect on city dwellers, planners and architects."
It continues: "By stimulating discussion, change and action, she has helped to make Canadian city streets and neighbourhoods vibrant, liveable and workable for all."
In a 1997 profile, The Globe's Doug Saunders wrote she is known as the "lady who resurrected The Neighbourhood: the whole notion of the city as a good and self-sustaining entity. Her epochal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities made millions of North Americans realize that "urban renewal" and government-planned development were hurting cities, and that bustling streets, tight-packed neighbourhoods and downtown clutter were actually good things."
A Jane Jacobs bookshelf
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): Cities rely on access to sidewalks and parks, high-density housing with a mix of incomes, uses and ages of buildings, and hands-off planning.
The Economy of Cities (1969): Urban economies are based on replacement of imports with indigenous products. Cycles of trade and entrepreneurship are vital to urban life.
The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle for Sovereignty (1980): Like Norway's separation from Sweden, Quebec's from Canada can be good for both parties if they maintain separate currencies.
Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984): National economies are in fact the economies of urban regions, and national economies work best when cities are given maximum autonomy. Backward cities should trade with one another and consider secession.
Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992): Human societies rely on two distinct systems of morality: "commercial" and "guardian." Both are vital, but troubles arise when the two are combined.
A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece (1995): Jacobs reconstructs the journals of her great aunt, part of the U.S. "civilization" of Alaska at the turn of the century, and annotates them with short essays on the civil and political life of a fledgling society.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060425.wjanejacobs0425/BNStory/National/
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
"Jane Jacobs"
(Photo, Toronto Globe and Mail)
Tuesday, April 25, 2006, 1:52 PM
SANDRA MARTIN
Globe and Mail Update
Jane Jacobs, the urban expert and social activist who wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities, died Tuesday morning at Toronto Western Hospital after about a year of up and down health problems.
She was taken to Toronto Western Hospital on Saturday after having suffered what appeared to be a stroke.
The American-born Canadian was 89 years. She was considered one of the most influential critics of urban planning.
As a public speaker she was feisty and outspoken, 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 issues. 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.
A free thinker, who loathed the modern tendency to credentialism, she took on the rigid thinking of post-war urban thinkers in her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She believed implicitly that there was no such thing as a straight line in the way people thought, or in the way people lived. Even the smallest organism is affected by many different stimuli, so it is impossible to predict behaviour with any accuracy.
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. She arrived in Toronto and almost immediately became embroiled in desperate struggles between 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.
Many people tried to label her, calling her everything from an amateur to an economist. She hated being pinned down, but the designation she allowed was urbanologist, a thinker about cities.
In the course of a long life she wrote several major books including, The Economy of Cities (1969) The Wealth of Nations (1984), a controversial book advocating Quebec sovereignty. The Question of Separatism (1980), Systems of Survival (1992) The Nature of Economies (2000) and Dark Age Ahead (2005).
Intensely private, she disliked public attention focused on her, rather than the causes she espoused. A dozen institutions offered her honourary degrees, but she turned them all down, because she feared that in accepting their accolades, she would have to give up something of herself for fundraising purposes. What she wanted, as she approached her 90th birthday this May, was more time for thinking and writing and being with family.
When she was appointed as an officer to the Order of Canada in 1996, her citation said "her seminal writings and thought-provoking commentaries on urban development have had a tremendous effect on city dwellers, planners and architects."
It continues: "By stimulating discussion, change and action, she has helped to make Canadian city streets and neighbourhoods vibrant, liveable and workable for all."
In a 1997 profile, The Globe's Doug Saunders wrote she is known as the "lady who resurrected The Neighbourhood: the whole notion of the city as a good and self-sustaining entity. Her epochal 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities made millions of North Americans realize that "urban renewal" and government-planned development were hurting cities, and that bustling streets, tight-packed neighbourhoods and downtown clutter were actually good things."
A Jane Jacobs bookshelf
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961): Cities rely on access to sidewalks and parks, high-density housing with a mix of incomes, uses and ages of buildings, and hands-off planning.
The Economy of Cities (1969): Urban economies are based on replacement of imports with indigenous products. Cycles of trade and entrepreneurship are vital to urban life.
The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle for Sovereignty (1980): Like Norway's separation from Sweden, Quebec's from Canada can be good for both parties if they maintain separate currencies.
Cities and the Wealth of Nations: Principles of Economic Life (1984): National economies are in fact the economies of urban regions, and national economies work best when cities are given maximum autonomy. Backward cities should trade with one another and consider secession.
Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics (1992): Human societies rely on two distinct systems of morality: "commercial" and "guardian." Both are vital, but troubles arise when the two are combined.
A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece (1995): Jacobs reconstructs the journals of her great aunt, part of the U.S. "civilization" of Alaska at the turn of the century, and annotates them with short essays on the civil and political life of a fledgling society.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060425.wjanejacobs0425/BNStory/National/
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060426.JACOBS26/TPStory/?query=jane+jacobs
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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."
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060426.JACOBS26/TPStory/?query=jane+jacobs
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Plainfiield Today and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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