INDEPTH: JANE JACOBS
Innocent abroad
by Robert Sheppard, CBC News Online | April 25, 2006
 Jane Jacobs, shown in 2004, influenced a generation of urban planners with her critiques about North American urban renewal policies. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)
We like to claim her as our own, this willful doctor's daughter from Scranton, Pa., who took herself off to Greenwich Village in New York City when barely out of her teens to become a writer. And then moved up to Toronto almost 40 years ago now when the Vietnam War threatened her draft-age sons and her own sense of everything that was right and proper.
But the fact is Jane Jacobs – author, thinker, urban activist, den mother, economist, cultural anthropologist and impish non-conformist – is one of those rare individuals, a true citizen of the world.
Torontonians, and Canadians, have some right to her of course. We embraced her, she embraced us, and a decade or so ago she took out Canadian citizenship, renouncing her U.S. one at the same time.
As well, most of her seven books were written here and her genteel activism – from helping stop the Spadina expressway in the mid-1970s to participating in a neighbourhood battle just a few years ago over one-way streets – has helped make Canada's largest city as creatively diverse as it is.
More importantly, her central idea that cities are "organic, spontaneous and untidy," not unlike the lady herself, have taken root in Toronto in – and she would hate this – an almost official way and leavened the campaigns of city leaders like David Crombie, John Sewell and the current mayor, David Miller.
Think of city policies that set height restrictions on buildings in certain areas, mandate a mixed-use percentage of commercial and residential properties, and require office towers to offer public areas, store fronts and art and you have a small sense of the Jane Jacobs legacy.
Still, Toronto is not big enough to fully house her ideas or reputation. Nor is New York, the metropolis where she first made her mark holding off the legendary city planner Robert Moses in a citizens' fight over a cross-town expressway.
There are prizes, university courses, seminars and symposiums devoted to Jacobs and her ideas all over the world, and have been now for decades. In parts of Europe, her admirers are almost slavish in their devotion. Not to put too fine a point on it, Jacobs was and still is the undisputed den mother of urban activists everywhere they care to raise a fist or a tree or a glass of wine in a neighbourhood cafe in the teeth of conformity.
This was a role Jacobs came to accept – her unfailing politeness and curiosity would allow no less – though not without a certain reluctance.
"I didn't inherit a great wish to be an activist," she told me once, four years ago in an interview for a cover story in Maclean's magazine. All she really wanted to do was be a writer or a journalist. This is what she went to Greenwich Village for in the middle of the Depression. This is what occupied her time almost all her adult life, even well into her 80s, while she sat happily most of her days in her darkened upstairs study, bookshelves held up by concrete blocks, banging away on an old green Remington.
One day I was there she was writing a new foreward for the Mark Twain classic Innocents Abroad and she was greatly amused at the suggestion the title might just capture her own rather unusual life.
She and her architect husband Robert Jacobs packed up their three kids and left the U.S. for Toronto in 1968 to get away from the madness of the Vietnam War as she recalled it.
She was also trying to escape what she saw as the madness of central planning and the U.S. (and much of Canada's) devotion to the automobile.
These twin preoccupations were leading to ever more complex expressways, shopping plazas, suburban sprawl and the slow destruction of old mixed-use urban neighbourhoods, a transformation she documented unstintingly in her best known work The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961).
Her activism flowed from that book in the main, and from the expressway battles (to save indigenous neighbourhoods) that she claimed she was mostly pushed into by events and others. Though it is hard to see anyone pushing Jane Jacobs around.
Behind that polite, grandmotherly exterior was a will of steel, rooted in the work ethic of a Depression-era idealist and an unflagging amateur's curiosity that saw her tackle, in her books, subjects as far a field as city life, the economics of nations, Quebec separation and the moral foundations of commerce.
Her most recent Dark Age Ahead, published just two years ago, cast a similarly wide net among different cultures – ancient Chinese, North American Indian, contemporary U.S. – examining them in freeze-frame in different moments of decline. And if it showed an unusual pessimism in its tone, it also exhibited the natural breadth of Jacob's free-floating curiosity.
Someone once called her the anthropologist of everyday life for the simple reason that she noticed things. Like the way kids walk across a schoolyard. Or the fact that expressways almost never lead to a shorter commute. And when she noticed something, it made others sit up and take stock as well.
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