How Jane Jacobs Changed My Life

I’ve been interested in cities for as long as I can remember. My childhood is marked by Lego metropolises on the living room floor, streetscapes doodled in schoolbooks and early Saturday mornings playing SimCity for hours on end. So it only made sense that, when I was fourteen, on a beautiful summer day spent wandering Vancouver’s streets, my uncle turned to me and insisted that I read Jane Jacobs.

“Sure,” I mumbled in a teenagerly way and we continued walking. He proceeded to tell me about a Marxist-Leninist bookstore on Hastings Street that had a great urban-issues section. “You should go there sometime,” he added.

Later that year, sitting under my family’s Christmas tree, I ripped opened a present from my uncle, revealing a bold mustard-coloured paperback. The title was stamped in bold capital letters: The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Below it was a blurb from the New York Times Book Review: “Perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning… a work of literature.”

It wasn’t until the following spring that I actually got around to reading Jane Jacobs’ 1961 classic, a book so widely read that it has never gone out of print. It opened my eyes. It confirmed what I had already begun to suspect about cities, about the way they worked, looked and felt, about their cultures and economies.

Looking around the Calgary of my youth, I saw how suburban planning had deprived the city of a public sphere. When I moved to Montreal, I was ecstatic to find exactly the opposite: a city whose human spirit was alive and visible in its streets, businesses and buildings. The seed of my interest in cities was planted a long time ago; Death and Life made it grow into something robust.

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Remembering Jane Jacobs

When Jane Jacobs died last spring, many urbanists were surprised by the breadth and depth of the media coverage that followed. Her work was subjected to the kind of widespread attention it hadn’t received in decades; many people were compelled to read or re-read her classics, especially The Death and Life of Great American Cities. But what now? As Lisa Rochon wrote in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail, little has been done in Canada — her home for nearly four decades — to ensure that her ideas will continue to make a difference in the years to come. Unlike some other architecture critics (or should I say starchitecture groupies), Rochon has always recognized the power of Jacobs’ work. It comes as no surprise, then, that she has compiled a pretty solid list of ways in which Jacobs could be memorialized.

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Eyes on the Street

The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street.

– Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American Cities.

Woman at window above Portobello Road, London.

Man staring down towards Cloître de Notre-Dame, Paris.