The influential book by urban activist Jane Jacobs is published. In it, the New York resident takes direct aim at urban planning policies. From a 2011 article in The Guardian newspaper: "Jacobs, a housewife, mother and part-time architectural journalist, had been drawn into the campaign to prevent New York's dictatorial planning boss Robert Moses -- who had already ripped up swaths of the city -- from driving a highway through her native Greenwich Village. ... But her book did not just dwell, negatively, on the harm New York's car-obsessed, modern-minded planners were doing. Building on close observeration of her own and other neighborhoods, she mounted a thorough and original defense of traditional city forms against both the garden city movement and modernist city planning. She argued that dense, mixed-income mixed-use neighborhoods, designed around short city blocks with busy amenity-lined streets and small parks, had a huge range of benefits unappreciated by modern urban planners, who mistakenly associated the old city with all the evils of the 19th-century slum."
The photo shows Jacobs at a December 1961 news conference of the Committee to Save the West Village. (From the New York World-Telegram & Sun Newspaper Collection, Library of Congress)
* Short biography (from Project for Public Spaces): @
* New York Times review (November 5, 1961): @
* "Cobblestone Conservative: How Jane Jacobs saved New York City's Soul" (The American Conservative, October 2011): @
* Symposium on book and its impact (From The American Conservative): @
* "Genius of Common Sense: Jane Jacobs and the story of 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities' " (book by Glenna Lang and Marjory Wunsch): @
* "Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York's Master Builder and Transformed the American City" (book by Anthony Flint): @
* "Downtown is for People" (1958 article by Jacobs in Fortune magazine): @
* New York Times obituary (2006): @
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