Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs (1961)

Jane Jacobs , OC , O.Ont (born May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania as Jane Butzner , † April 25, 2006 in Toronto ) was a US- born Canadian non-fiction author, city critic and architecture critic .

Life

She lived in New York's Greenwich Village neighborhood in the 1950s and early 1960s . A large-scale renovation was to be carried out there around 1960 . This would have resulted in the loss of over 80% of the existing, mixed and grown building fabric and the displacement of thousands of residents, including many artists and traders. A large number of area renovations had been carried out in New York according to the same scheme since the early 1940s under the aegis of Robert Moses . The existing three- to five-storey perimeter block development was largely completely replaced by 10- to 18-storey, free-standing residential high-rises with the same brick facades. These renovation measures always involved clearing slums, which is why the areas between the new high-rise buildings were often planted with greenery; It was also about reducing the population density of the affected districts, which was usually extremely high before the renovation. In this way, for example, almost all of the development on the Lower East Side along the East River in the south of Manhattan was completely replaced by new buildings within a few years. After Greenwich Village was officially declared a “ slum ” around 1960 , the neighborhood faced a fate similar to that of the Lower East Side. It is largely thanks to Jane Jacobs that a major citizens' movement emerged there for the first time, uniting the very diverse residents of the area with the aim of preventing the area from being destroyed. In 1962 this goal was achieved. Of course, it could not be prevented that as part of the upgrading renovation measures in the coming decades, the rents kept climbing to new heights and forcing many of the residents to move out of their village after all .

Since 1969 she lived with her husband, the architect Robert H. Jacobs, Jr. († 1996) in Toronto , Canada. The couple have two sons, James and Ned, and daughter Mary Jacobs. In her new hometown, too, she was very quickly involved in urban planning issues. For example, she was able to help prevent the planned Spadina Expressway .

subjects

Her most important work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , was published in 1961. In this pamphlet, she protested against the prevailing urban planning of the time. She criticized the loss of established urban structures - with their urban mixes of different uses of the buildings - and the practice of urban planning, which seemed to be based on classical modernism and living, working, leisure time etc. modeled on the garden city and “ville radieuse ”tried to separate.

Instead, it called for a diverse, mixed development within a street, a wide range of different buildings in a quarter, the creation of lively neighborhoods and small-scale, unplanned quarters. She showed how everyday interaction in such a neighborhood builds a network that she describes as “ social capital ” and that forms the basis for mutual trust, joint activities and resilience in times of crisis. With this diagnosis, she met the needs of the post-war period, when entire districts had previously been leveled under the motto “Urban Renewal” and re-linked into the metropolitan network as car-friendly building blocks. Since the 1960s, published opinion has increasingly focused on the losses that have occurred.

Jane Jacobs' importance as a critic of urban planning in the USA is comparable to that of Alexander Mitscherlich, who died in 1982 ( The Inhospitableness of Our Cities ; Theses on the City of the Future ) in the German-speaking area. There Jacobs influenced, among others, Wolf Jobst Siedler , who later published The Murdered City . The magazine "Literary Review of Canada" rated Jacobs' 1961 book as one of the 25 most influential books in Canada in the past 25 years.

According to Jacobs, urban diversity is also important for economic reasons, in order to promote the exchange between companies, attract creative companies and stop the decline. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1985) she developed a theory of economic urban growth based on import substitution. If (non-agricultural) products imported into settlements are gradually replaced by self-produced products, larger cities could develop from them. A city's internal exchange and the export of its products are an important source of growth.

Jane's Walk

The Knesset -Abgeordnete Tamar Zandberg makes a neighborhood walk in Tel-Aviv

Jane's Walk is a series of neighborhood walks inspired by the namesake. Starting from Toronto (2007), Jane's Walks are now being held in more than 100 cities worldwide.

Works

  • Downtown is for People - in The Exploding Metropolis . Editors of Fortune (eds.). New York: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1958.
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities. 1961. ISBN 0-679-74195-X
  • The Economy of Cities. 1970 ISBN 0-39470584-X
    • Übers. Eva Gärtner: Death and Life of Great American Cities. Bauwelt Fundamente , 4th Ullstein, Berlin 1963; again Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn, Braunschweig 1993. ISBN 3-764-36356-8
  • Cities and the Wealth of Nations. Principles of Economic Life . New York: Random House 1985. ISBN 0-39472911-0
  • Dark Age Ahead. Vintage books 2005. ISBN 978-0-679-31310-6

literature

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Jane's Walks in the Cities
personal data
SURNAME Jacobs, Jane
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Butzner, Jane (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American non-fiction author, city and architecture critic
DATE OF BIRTH May 4, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Scranton, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 2006
Place of death Toronto