JANE JACOBS MUDASSIR HAQQANI

FAROOQ DURRANI
Course: Urban Morphology
JAMSHED WAZIR
National Institute of Urban Infrastructure Planning
KALEEM ULLAH
University of Engineering and Technology, Peshawar, KP, Pakistan. BASIT MAJEED
NIUIP
 • An American-Canadian journalist, author, and activist who
influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics.

• In 1961, she wrote a book called “The Death and Life of

Great American Cities”, which inspired generations of urban
planners and activists.
INTRODUCTION
• She opposed the idea of “Urban Renewal” and “Slum
Clearance” and actively led movements against downtown
expressways in New York and in Toronto, Canada.

• She was an advocate for a place-based, community-

centered approach to urban planning.
 Jane Jacobs, protesting
condemned West Village housing.
Her son Ned in the background.
 • Jane Jacobs was born in 1916 and died in April 2006.

• In 1952, she became associate editor of Architectural Forum.

Where she closely observed the mechanisms of city planning
and urban renewal.

• In the process, she became increasingly critical of

BIOGRAPHY conventional planning theory and practice, observing that
many of the city rebuilding projects she wrote about were
not safe, interesting, alive, or economically sound.

• The observations were later reflected in her book “The Death

and Life of Great American Cities”.
 • Jacobs also became involved in urban activism, leading local
efforts to oppose the top-down neighborhood clearing and
stopping Robert Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan
Expressway which would pass through Manhattan's
Washington Square Park and West Village.

• She got arrested in 1968 but the campaign is often considered

BIOGRAPHY to be one of the turning points in the development of New
York City.

• Jacobs' harsh criticism of "slum-clearing" and high-rise

housing projects was also instrumental in discrediting these
once universally supported planning practices.
 Demonstrators protest charges
against activist & author Jane
Jacobs (not pictured), New York,
New York, May 8, 1968.
 • In 1968 Jacobs moved with her family to Toronto, where she
remained an outspoken critic of top-down city planning. In the
early 1970s she helped lead the Stop Spadina Campaign, to
prevent the construction of a major highway through some of
Toronto's liveliest neighborhoods.

BIOGRAPHY • After publishing The Death and Life of Great American Cities,
her interests and writings broadened, discussing economics,
morals, and social relations. Her subsequent books include
The Economy of Cities (1969); The Question of Separatism
(1980); Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984); Systems of
Survival (1993); and most recently The Nature of Economies
(2000).
Jane Jacobs in a protest.
 CITIES AS ECOSYSTEMS
• Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems

• She suggested that over time, buildings, streets and

neighborhoods function as dynamic organisms, changing in
response to how people interact with them.
PERSPECTIVES
• She explained how each element of a city - sidewalks, parks,
neighborhoods, government, economy - functions together,
in the same manner as the natural ecosystem.

• This understanding helps us learn how cities work, how they

break down, and how they could be better structured.
 MIXED-USE DEVELOPMENT

• Jacobs advocated for "mixed-use" urban development - the

integration of different building types and uses, whether
residential or commercial, old or new. According to this idea,
cities depend on a diversity of buildings, residences,
businesses and other non-residential uses, as well as people
PERSPECTIVES
of different ages using areas at different times of day, to
create community vitality.

• She saw cities as being "organic, spontaneous, and untidy,"

and views the intermingling of city uses and users as crucial
to economic and urban development.
 BOTTOM-UP COMMUNITY PLANNING

• Jacobs contested the traditional planning approach that

relies on the judgment of outside experts, proposing that
local expertise is better suited to guiding community
development.
PERSPECTIVES
• She based her writing on empirical experience and
observation, noting how the prescribed government policies
for planning and development are usually inconsistent with
the real-life functioning of city neighborhoods.
 THE CASE FOR HIGHER DENSITY

• Although orthodox planning theory had blamed high density

for crime, filth, and a host of other problems, Jacobs
disproved these assumptions and demonstrated how a high
concentration of people is vital for city life, economic
growth, and prosperity. While acknowledging that density
PERSPECTIVES
alone does not produce healthy communities, she illustrated
through concrete examples how higher densities yield a
critical mass of people that is capable of supporting more
vibrant communities. In exposing the difference between
high density and overcrowding, Jacobs dispelled many
myths about high concentrations of people.
 LOCAL ECONOMIES

• By dissecting how cities and their economies emerge and

grow, Jacobs cast new light on the nature of local economies.
She contested the assumptions that cities are a product of
agricultural advancement; that specialized, highly efficient
economies fuel long-term growth; and that large, stable
PERSPECTIVES businesses are the best sources of innovation. Instead, she
developed a model of local economic development based on
adding new types of work to old, promoting small
businesses, and supporting the creative impulses of urban
entrepreneurs.
 • "Probably no single thinker has done more in the last fifty
years to transform our ideas about the nature of urban life.“-
Chicago Tribune

• "Jane Jacobs' observations about the way cities work and

don't work revolutionized the urban planning profession.
ACCOLADES Thanks to Jacobs, ideas once considered lunatic, such as
mixed-use development, short blocks, and dense
concentrations of people working and living downtown, are
now taken for granted." - Adele Freedman, The Globe and
Mail
THE END