The first major biography of the irrepressible woman who changed the way we view and live in cities, and whose influence is felt to this day. Jane Jacobs was a phenomenal woman who wrote seven groundbreaking books, saved neighborhoods, stopped expressways, was arrested twice, and engaged in thousands of impassioned debates—all of which she won. Robert Kanigel's revelatory portrait of Jacobs, based on new sources and interviews, brings to life the child who challenged her third-grade teacher; the high school poet; the mother who raised three children; the journalist who honed her skills at Architectural Forum and Fortune before writing her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities; and the activist who helped lead a successful protest against Robert Moses’s proposed expressway through her beloved Greenwich Village.

Jane Jacobs is universally recognized as one of the key figures in American urbanism. The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, she uncovered the complex and intertwined physical and social fabric of the city and excoriated the urban renewal policies of the 1950s. As the legend goes, Jacobs, a housewife, single-handedly stood up to Robert Moses, New York City's powerful master builder, and other city planners who sought first to level her Greenwich Village neighborhood and then to drive a highway through it. Jacobs's most effective weapons in these David-versus-Goliath battles, and in writing her book, were her powers of observation and common sense. What is missing from such discussions and other myths about Jacobs, according to Peter L. Laurence, is a critical examination of how she arrived at her ideas about city life. Laurence shows that although Jacobs had only a high school diploma, she was nevertheless immersed in an elite intellectual community of architects and urbanists. Becoming Jane Jacobs is an intellectual biography that chronicles Jacobs's development, influences, and writing career, and provides a new foundation for understanding Death and Life and her subsequent books. Laurence explains how Jacobs's ideas developed over many decades and how she was influenced by members of the traditions she was critiquing, including Architectural Forum editor Douglas Haskell, shopping mall designer Victor Gruen, housing advocate Catherine Bauer, architect Louis Kahn, Philadelphia city planner Edmund Bacon, urban historian Lewis Mumford, and the British writers at The Architectural Review. Rather than discount the power of Jacobs's critique or contributions, Laurence asserts that Death and Life was not the spontaneous epiphany of an amateur activist but the product of a professional writer and experienced architectural critic with deep knowledge about the renewal and dynamics of American cities.

In this indispensable book, urban visionary Jane Jacobs argues that as agrarianism gives way to a technology-based future, we’re at risk of cultural collapse. Jacobs—renowned author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities and The Economy of Cities—pinpoints five pillars of our culture that are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation, and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions. The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism, and the growing gulf between rich and poor. But this is a hopeful book as well as a warning. Drawing on a vast frame of reference—from fifteenth-century Chinese shipbuilding to Ireland’s cultural rebirth—Jacobs suggests how the cycles of decay can be arrested and our way of life renewed. Invigorating and accessible, Dark Age Ahead is not only the crowning achievement of Jane Jacobs’ career, but one of the most important works of our time.

“Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority.” —The New York Sun Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning,” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instantly recognized as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1961. In the decades that followed, Jacobs remained a brilliant and revered commentator on architecture, urban life, and economics until her death in 2006. These interviews capture Jacobs at her very best and are an essential reminder of why Jacobs was—and remains—unrivaled in her analyses and her ability to cut through cant and received wisdom. From the Trade Paperback edition.

A thorough investigation of how Jane Jacobs’s ideas about the life and economy of great cities grew from her home city, Scranton Jane Jacobs’s First City vividly reveals how this influential thinker and writer’s classic works germinated in the once vibrant, mid-size city of Scranton, Pennsylvania, where Jane spent her initial eighteen years. In the 1920s and 1930s, Scranton was a place of enormous diversity and opportunity. Small businesses of all kinds abounded and flourished, quality public education was available to and supported by all, and even recent immigrants could save enough to buy a house. Opposing political parties joined forces to tackle problems, and citizens worked together for the public good. Through interviews with contemporary Scrantonians and research of historic newspapers, city directories, and vital records, author Glenna Lang has uncovered Scranton as young Jane experienced it and shows us the lasting impact of her growing up in this thriving and accessible environment. Readers can follow the development of Jane’s acute observational abilities from childhood through her passion in early adulthood to understand and write about what she saw. Reflecting Jane’s belief in trusting one’s own direct observation above all, this volume has been richly illustrated with historic and modern color images that help bring alive a lost Scranton. The book demonstrates why, at the end of Jacobs’s life, her thoughts and conversations increasingly returned to Scranton and the potential for cohesion and inclusiveness in all cities.

Leading thinkers offer fresh insight into the workings of vibrant, ecological, equitable communities and their economies.