Canadian Voices - Speakers

	Jane Jacobs
	An Evening With Jane Jacobs Date Recorded: May 19th, 2004 Recorded At: Vancouver Public Library Recorded By: Necessary Voices Society Duration: 59:30
Topic Background
Jane Jacobs is widely recognised as one of the founders of the "new urbanism" movement, an alternative to conventional approaches to land use and transportation planning. The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her first book, was published in 1961. Quite possibly the most influential US book on urban planning, and widely read by both planning professionals and the general public, the book was a strong critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s which, she claimed, destroyed neighbourhoods, gutted central areas of cities, and created isolating, unnatural urban spaces. Jacobs advocated dense, mixed-use neighborhoods as found in traditional American cities. This book challenged planners and decision-makers to uphold common sense, careful observation, and personal experience as the basis for their work. Jacobs was an early voice warning that what was being billed as urban renewal—big housing projects, expressways, and business districts, was actually creating more problems than it was solving. Within and since this initial effort, she has demonstrated ways to do better, step by small step. In this edition of Canadian Voices, Jane Jacobs discussed themes from her last book,Dark Age Ahead, and had a conversation with Vancouver housing and community activist Jim Green on her views on municipal taxes and housing density, urban planning and zoning.
Speaker Biography
The late Jane Jacobs was an urban theorist, activist and author born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1916, who moved to Toronto, Ontario in 1968, where she resided until her death in 2006. She decided to leave the United States in part out of her objection to the Vietnam War and due to worry about the fate of her two draft-age sons. She chose Toronto as she found it a pleasant city and its rapid growth meant plenty of work for her architect husband. Her activism in New York City, where she lived in the 1960’s, involved the successful battle to stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have leveled fourteen blocks the West Village, destroyed thousands of historic structures and displaced nearly 10,000 residents and workers. Upon Jacob’s 1968 arrival in Toronto’s Annex neighbourhood, she focused her efforts on a successful fight to defeat the planned Spadina Expressway. In addition to her masterwork of 1961, The Life and Death of Great American Cities, Jacobs has authored a number of other influential books, including The Economy of Cities, published in 1969, Systems of Survival, published in 1992, which explores the moral underpinnings of work, and 2000’s The Nature of Economies. Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead, deals not just with cities but with civilisation itself. She claimed she wrote it "to help our culture avoid sliding into a dead end."

Jane Jacobs

Topic Background

Speaker Biography