Exploring the Thought of Jane Jacobs: The Conversation of Cities

With the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) changed the way urban planners, architects, politicians, and ordinary citizens understood the city and its challenges. Less attention has been paid to her six subsequent works on cities and economies; Exploring the Thought of Jane Jacobs: The Conversation of Cities seeks to remedy that neglect. With careful attention to context, the book explores Jacobs's understanding of streets and neighborhoods in cities great and small; her vision of the city as an organism, extended through generations, not an artifact; the dynamics of economic development; the ethics of the workplace and the difficulties of ethical business practice and the need for a politics of place crossing generations. It reveals what Jacobs saw as crucial to education and concludes with suggestions of what Jacobs would see as necessary actions for our fraught times. The book should be of interest to any reader concerned about cities and their future and to students of urban planning, architecture, and economics.