Urban thinker Jane Jacobs dies

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning.

Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89.

Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a generation.

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Penn., Jacobshad made her home in Canada since the late 1960s.

Educated at Columbia University, she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs, at the Office of War Information in New York, where she began writing during the war.

The strong themes of her writing and activism includedopposition to expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban planning, sayingit was killing inner cities and discouraging the economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

Jacobs settled in Toronto in 1969. There she supported developments such as the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, an inner-city development for people of all income levels.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, which led to a book of the same name.

Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead is "a grave warning to a society losing its memory," jurists said in awarding her the $15,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2005.

"In spare, exquisite prose, Jane Jacobs alerts us to the dangers facing the family, higher education, science and technology, the professions, and fiscal accountability. Drawing on history, geography, and anthropology, this book reflects a lifetime of study and observation, offering us lessons to avoid decline," the jury said.

Dark Age Ahead finds comparisons between our current North American culture and European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages.

Interviewed by Canadian Press when she won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, Jacobs said, "People really know themselves that the dark age is ahead. They're worried, and they haven't articulated it, but they feel it."

"I think it's late but we don't need to go down the drain," she said. "But we will if we aren't aware. It's a cautionary book."