Who is jane jacobs?

Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs, OC OOnt (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) was an American-Canadian writer and activist with primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been described as "one of 20th-century architecture's most traumatic events", but also credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.

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Famous quotes containing the words jane jacobs, jane and/or jacobs:

    ... city areas with flourishing diversity sprout strange and unpredictable uses and peculiar scenes. But this is not a drawback of diversity. This is the point ... of it.
    Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)

    If the veil were withdrawn from the sanctuary of domestic life, and man could look upon the fear, the loathing, the detestations which his tyranny and reckless gratification of self has caused to take the place of confiding love, which placed a woman in his power, he would shudder at the hideous wrong of the present regulations of the domestic abode.
    —Lydia Jane Pierson, U.S. women’s rights activist and corresponding editor of The Woman’s Advocate. The Woman’s Advocate, represented in The Lily, pp. 117-8 (1855-1858 or 1860)

    ... a family I know ... bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.
    —Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)