RIP Jane Jacobs

The great urbanist writer, whose 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities inspired Americans to take cities more seriously, died yesterday at 89. Jacobs was famous for organizing a successful protest against Robert Moses's plans to build an expressway across Lower Manhattan linking the Holland Tunnel to the Manhattan Bridge, which would have destroyed Soho and part of Greenwich Village. (And for what? Making it easy to get from New Jersey to Long Island?) Jacobs presented the idea that grand urban projects that favor the car over pedestrians, such as highways, as well as business complexes with on-site parking (such as the Empire State Plaza in Albany), devalued the streetscape and failed to take the people of a city in mind. Cities, she argued, were organic institutions that derived their vitality from street life and neighborhoods, not overblown architectural projects. Like many intellectuals in America, Jacobs was ignored for awhile, but her ideas gained more credence as many of these "urban renewal" projects pushed by big-city planners failed to work out as advertised and cities that paid more attention to what they had began to thrive. It's a pity in this age of automobile suburbia that more people still don't take such ideas seriously.