She worked as a secretary at a trade magazine, and freelanced for the Sunday Herald Tribune and Vogue, writing about local neighbourhoods. This sentiment, though, struck a chord in the 1950s when top-down planners, and notably Robert Moses, had achieved almost god-like powers over the future development of major American cities.īorn in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Jacobs left high school to work as an unpaid women’s page editor at the Scranton Tribune before moving to New York City in 1935. Of course, cities never are “created by everybody”, as Jacobs, a former associate editor of Architectural Forum magazine, knew quite well.
Far from perfect, they can feel larger than life. For Jacobs, a great city was a messy city, a kind of giant circus, theatre or bazaar, as New York had been before WWII and as some renowned cities – Kolkata, Palermo, Medellín, Naples – are even today. Or at least those who appeared to believe more in ideas and concepts than people and the lives they lived in streets that seemed little more than an unholy and unhygienic mess to tidy minded bureaucrats and their ambitious architects. This was the core message of Jane Jacobs’ fight against city powers and planners. Citizen Jane opens with a line from The Death and Life of Great American Cities typewritten across the screen: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
She celebrated the messy vitality of life on the street, of lively neighbourhoods where small businesses thrived, children played on sidewalks and people of different backgrounds rubbed shoulders. For Jacobs, cities were more about people than buildings and grand designs.
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