Best known for her book The [Death And Life Of Great American Cities]. She lived in Greenwich Village when she wrote it.

Now (2005) she lives in Toronto. Her family moved there when her 2 sons were about to flee the country to avoid the draft during the Vietnam War.

• died 2006

list of her core books, by avg Amazon customer review (best first)

• [Death And Life Of American Cities] (1961) ISBN:067974195x

• Economy Of Cities (1970) ISBN:0-394-70584-X

• Cities And The Wealth Of Nations (1984) ISBN:0394729110

• Systems Of Survival (1994) (a Socrat Ic Dia Logue) ISBN:0679748164

• [Nature Of Economies] (2000) another Dia Logue format - really about [Systems Theory] - ISBN:0375702431

• [Dark Age Ahead] (2004) ISBN:1400062322 In Dark Age Ahead, Jane Jacobs identifies five pillars of our culture that we depend on but which are in serious decline: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and self-policing by learned professions.

  • her summary in the [Globe And Mail]

  • Francis Fukuyama review - Jacobs seems strangely out of touch with important trends of the past generation, which she herself played a role in shaping.

  • [All Consuming] links

  • Jason Kottke review

  • [Scott Spires] review - There's a good book in this roaming, sketchy volume struggling to get out. It has to do with either the irrationalities of urban planning (a book Jacobs already wrote), or with the importance of cultural memory. Some of its sections would work well as stand-alone articles. But taken as a whole, Dark Age Ahead is an illustration of [Karl Kraus]' dictum that the value of education is best displayed when educated people speak on a subject that lies outside their field of expertise.

Interview with James Howard Kunstler (2000) Import Replacement: The idea that a city and its region would only prosper if over time it started to furnish for itself many of the goods or services that it formerly imported... Q: With the latest model of the so-called global economy we are given to believe that import replacement is no longer significant. To the extraordinary degree that an overwhelming majority of the products sold in the U.S. are made elsewhere. Is this a dangerous situation? A: Well I think that it's a more dangerous situation-the standardization of what is being produced or reproduced everywhere, where you can see it in the malls, in every city, the same chains, the same products are to be found. This goes even deeper with the trouble with import replacing because it means that new things are not being produced locally that can be improvements or anyway different. There is a sameness-this is one of the things that is boring people-this sameness. This sameness has economic implications. You don't get new products and services out of sameness. Now the Americans haven't gotten dumbed down all of the sudden so that only a few people who can decide on new products for change are the only ones with brains. But it means that somehow there isn't opportunity for these thousands flowers to bloom anymore... I think it is fatal to specialize.

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs

profiles from 1994 and 2003 on her Dynam Ist attitudes.

profile/intro by Michael___ of 2blowhards

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