Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Thanks Jane


Jane Jacobs is dead and the world is a little poorer today because of it. Jacobs died at the age of 89 in Toronto.

Jacobs is the author of the justifiably famous book Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her book was a frontal attack on the absurdity of urban planning. Jacobs showed that people are the dynamic on which cities are built and that planners, by interfering with the plans of people, make life worse for everyone. Jacobs once said: "I hate the government for making my life absurd." In 1968 she left her beloved New York City to move to Canada in protest to US intervention in Vietnam and to shield her sons from the viciousness of military conscription.