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Jane Jacobs (née Butzner; 4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, theorist, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that "urban renewal" and "slum clearance" did not respect the needs of city-dwellers.Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from urban renewal and slum clearance – in particular plans by Robert Moses to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood. She was instrumental in the eventual cancellation of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have passed directly through the area of Manhattan that would later become known as SoHo, as well as part of Little Italy and Chinatown. She was arrested in 1968 for inciting a crowd at a public hearing on that project. After moving to Toronto in 1968, she joined the opposition to the Spadina Expressway and the associated network of expressways in Toronto that were planned and under construction.As a woman and a writer who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning, Jacobs endured scorn from established figures. Routinely, she was described first as a housewife, as she did not have a college degree or any formal training in urban planning; as a result, her lack of credentials was seized upon as grounds for criticism. However, the influence of her concepts eventually was acknowledged by highly respected professionals such as Richard Florida and Robert Lucas. Early years Jacobs was born Jane Isabel Butzner in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Bess Robison Butzner, a former teacher and nurse, and John Decker Butzner, a physician. They were a Protestant family. Her brother, John Decker Butzner, Jr., served as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. After graduation from Scranton High School, she worked for a year as the unpaid assistant to the women's page editor at the Scranton Tribune. New York City In 1935, during the Great Depression, she moved to New York City with her sister Betty. Jane Butzner took an immediate liking to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, which deviated some from the city's grid structure. The sisters soon moved there from Brooklyn.During her early years in Manhattan, Jacobs held a variety of jobs working as a stenographer and freelance writer, writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she later said, "gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like". Her first job was for a trade magazine, as a secretary, then an editor. She sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue.She studied at Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. About the freedom to pursue study across her wide-ranging interests, she said: For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high-school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education. Career After attending Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, Butzner found a job at Iron Age magazine. Her 1943 article on economic decline in Scranton was well publicized and led the Murray Corporation of America to locate a warplane factory there. Encouraged by this success, Butzner petitioned the War Production Board to support more operations in Scranton. Experiencing job discrimination at Iron Age, she also advocated for equal pay for women and for the right of workers to unionize. Amerika She became a feature writer for the Office of War Information and then a reporter for Amerika, a publication of the U.S. State Department in the Russian language. While working there she met Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., a Columbia-educated architect who was designing warplanes for Grumman. They married in 1944. Together they had a daughter, Burgin, and two sons, James and Ned. They bought a three-story building at 555 Hudson Street. Jane continued to write for Amerika after the war, while Robert left Grumman and resumed work as an architect.The Jacobses rejected the rapidly growing suburbs as "parasitic", choosing to remain in Greenwich Village. They renovated their house, in the middle of a mixed residential and commercial area, and created a garden in the backyard.Working for the State Department during the McCarthy era, Jacobs received a questionnaire about her political beliefs and loyalties. Jacobs was anti-communist and had left the Federal Workers Union because of its apparent communist sympathies. Nevertheless, she was pro-union and purportedly appreciated the writing of Saul Alinsky; therefore she was under suspicion. On 25 March 1952, Jacobs delivered her response to Conrad E. Snow, chairman of the Loyalty Security Board at the United States Department of State. In her foreword to her answer, she said: The other threat to the security of our tradition, I believe, lies at home. It is the current fear of radical ideas and of people who propound them. I do not agree with the extremists of either the left or the right, but I think they should be allowed to speak and to publish, both because they themselves have, and ought to have, rights, and once their rights are gone, the rights of the rest of us are hardly safe Architectural Forum Jacobs left Amerika in 1952 when it announced its relocation to Washington, D.C. She then found a well-paying job at Architectural Forum, published by Henry Luce of Time Inc. She was hired as an associate editor. After early success in that position, Jacobs began to take assignments on urban planning and "urban blight". In 1954, she was assigned to cover a development in Philadelphia designed by Edmund Bacon. Although her editors expected a positive story, Jacobs criticized Bacon's project, reacting against its lack of concern for the poor African Americans who were directly affected. When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she determined that "development" seemed to end community life on the street. When Jacobs returned to the offices of Architectural Forum, she began to question the 1950s consensus on urban planning.In 1955, Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem. Kirk came to the Architectural Forum offices to describe the impact that "revitalization" had on East Harlem, and he introduced Jacobs to the neighborhood.In 1956, while standing in for Douglas Haskell of Architectural Forum, Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University. She addressed leading architects, urban pla.... Discover the Jane Jacobs popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Jane Jacobs books.