![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Realignments in urban politics may have changed her reputation, but they also present a new opportunity for imagining the good city. So, can we still learn from Jacobs today? In the conversation below, Zipp, Nate Storring and Jennifer Hock plumb both her blind spots and prescient thinking. The evils of urban renewal are largely historical, while a popular alternative to the neoliberal city has yet to emerge. But as historian Samuel Zipp writes, “if she remains ‘Saint Jane’ to many she is less revered by others, appearing now as a thinker mired in the past at best, and an object of mild suspicion at worst.” Today, as many more scholars, critics, and activists focus on the city’s structures of violent exclusion, from residential segregation to racist policing, the street-level view appears myopic, and sidewalks, stoops, and small shops look like a recipe for gentrification. ![]() Not for nothing is the book - published sixty years ago, in 1961 - a classic of both urban studies and American literature, or is postwar US urban history so often reduced to the story of a beatific Jane Jacobs versus an evil Robert Moses in a battle between top-down, homogeneous banality and participatory, incremental diversity. For so many urbanists, for so many years, Jane Jacobs’ Death and Life of Great American Cities has been an eye-opening guide to seeing the city and its workings: an affirmation of its joys and a celebration of its capacity for self-regulation. ![]()
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