Jane Jacobs

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 Socratic Dialogue) ISBN:0679748164
• Nature Of Economies (2000) another Dialogue 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. (Collapse)

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 Dynamist attitudes.

profile/intro by Michael___ of 2blowhards