Episode 25: Jane Jacobs
Jane Butzner was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1935 Jane and her sister Betty moved to Brooklyn, New York and later to her favorite location Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Jane would work as a secretary and a writer, and eventually she worked at the Office of War Information and the U.S. State Department writing U.S. propaganda on American history, industry, and politics for placement in the foreign press. In 1944, Jane married Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr. an architect.
In 1952, Jane moved to Washington D.C. and began working at the publication "Architectural Forum". There she would write articles about urban planning projects and she later would become an associate editor. Jane would investigate several urban development projects in Philadelphia and East Harlem. It was there she came to believe that there was a common consensus that urban planning exhibited very little compassion for the actual people involved, especially for African Americans. As a stand-in for a colleague in 1956, Jane gave a lecture at Harvard. Her lecture was on her observation of East Harlem and the importance of "strips of chaos" over any sort of concept of urban order. This speech was very well-received and Jane was asked to write an article for Fortune Magazine. In that article, Jane used the opportunity to write “Downtown Is for People” criticizing Parks Commissioner Robert Moses for his approach to the redevelopment of New York City, which she believed neglected the needs of the community by focusing too heavily on concepts like scale, order, and efficiency.
In 1958 Jane received a large grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to study city planning in New York, and after 3 years Jane published her renowned book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” This book would be instrumental in taking down Robert Moses and saving Jane's beloved Greenwich Village from being bulldozed.
In 1968, Jane and her family moved to Canada. In Canada, Jane once again became involved in stopping an expressway and in rebuilding neighborhoods with a more community-friendly plan. Jane Jacobs died in 2006 in Toronto. Her family asked that she be remembered “by reading her books and implementing her ideas.” In addition to "The Death and Life of Great American Cities", she wrote six other books.
Video of Jane vs. Robert Moses
Caryatid: Mabel O. Wilson
Mabel O. Wilson is trained in Architecture and American Studies. Her training in these two fields informs her research and work. She has a transdisciplinary practice Studio & where Wilson makes visible and legible the ways that anti-black racism shapes the built environment along with the ways that blackness creates spaces of imagination, refusal, and desire. Her research investigates space, politics, and cultural memory in black America; race and modern architecture; new technologies and the social production of space; and visual culture in contemporary art, media, and film.
References
Chantry, Erin. “Urban Designer Series: Jane Jacobs. | Smart Cities Dive.” Smart Cities Dive, www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/urban-designer-series-jane-jacobs/92116. Accessed 6 Mar. 2021.
“Jane Jacobs Biography - Life, Family, Parents, Name, Death, School, Mother, Young.” Notable Biographies, www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Fl-Ka/Jacobs-Jane.html. Accessed 3 Mar. 2021.
Johnson Lewis, Jone. “Jane Jacobs: New Urbanist Who Transformed City Planning.” ThoughtCo, 14 July 2019, www.thoughtco.com/jane-jacobs-biography-4154171.
Laurence, Peter. “Jane Jacobs Was No ‘Saint,’ ‘Great Man,’ or ‘Ordinary Mom.’” BECOMING JANE JACOBS, 29 May 2018, becomingjanejacobs.com/blog/2016/9/22/jane-jacobs-was-no-saint.
Penner, Barbara. “The (Still) Dreary Deadlock of Public Housing.” Places Journal, 30 Oct. 2018, placesjournal.org/article/catherine-bauer-and-the-need-for-public-housing/?cn-reloaded=1.
Rich, Nathaniel. “Jane Jacobs’s Theories on Urban Planning—and Democracy in America.” The Atlantic, 18 Oct. 2016, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-prophecies-of-jane-jacobs/501104.
Schneider, Benjamin. “Bloomberg - Are You a Robot?” Bloomberg CityLab, 20 Dec. 2018, www.bloomberg.com/tosv2.html?vid=&uuid=8ef9e540-a18b-11eb-9a3b-912f061a9e4f&url=L25ld3MvYXJ0aWNsZXMvMjAxOC0xMi0yMC8xNS1wZW9wbGUtd2hvLXNoYXBlZC10aGUtbW9kZXJuLWFtZXJpY2FuLWNpdHk=.
Storring, Nathan. “Jane Jacobs on Gentrification.” Nathan Storring, 20 Feb. 2015, www.nathanstorring.com/2014/10/29/jane-jacobs-on-gentrification.
This Placemakers podcast episode, also tells the story of Jane and mentions the broadway play.
