April 25, 2006 - She was a true urban legend - she stood up for what she believed in and dared to challenge academics, politicians, and traditions, and in turn, she forever changed the world. She was Jane Jacobs.
Ms. Jacobs died today at the age of 89, just nine days shy of her 90th birthday.
For more than four decades, Ms. Jacobs championed for neighbourhoods, for mixed-use communities, for diversity. She fought against high-rise towers, slum-clearance, and multi-lane expressways that threatened to turn downtowns into wastelands. Her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (which I'm re-reading now ironically), was "the" book on modern city planning. Her ideas of "eyes on the street", the "street ballet", and the importance of mixing commercial and residential buildings remain as relevant today as over 40 years ago, when the book was first published.
More so than most cities, Toronto owes a huge debt of gratitude to Ms. Jacobs. When she moved in TO in 1968, Ms. Jacobs was already an accomplished community activist, having successfully fought against the powerful Robert Moses and the Lower Manhattan Expressway in New York City. The elevated highway was to cut through and destroy such beloved neighbourhoods as Greenwich Village, Washington Square, and Chinatown - neighbourhoods that make up the heart of New York City today.
Just as she was slowly settling in Toronto, she found herself once again fighting against planners and politicians. This time it was to stop the Spadina Expressway - a planned highway that was to cut through the Annex, UofT district, and Chinatown, all the way to the Gardiner Expressway. Her activism not only stopped the Spadina Expressway, but the entire Metro Expressway Project, which would have seen multiple highways cutting through the city.
Throughout the next four decades, Ms. Jacobs continued to fight for people in cities. Whether it was to save historical buildings or to stop the expansion of highway systems, Ms. Jacobs was never shy to stand up for what she believed in. Her ideas changed the planning profession - planning became a people profession and is no longer about cars, technology, or efficiency. Her philosophy is not only taught in schools, but is also the foundation of most of our modern planning principles.
It's hard to imagine Toronto or New York without Ms. Jacobs. Just the other day, when I was standing at the Spadina streetcar stop just south of Harbord, this thought came to mind: Without Jane Jacobs, I could be standing in the middle of a highway right now.
Though I never had the opportunity to meet Ms. Jacobs (we had tried to get her to be our guest speaker at our Planning Student Conference back in 2005), she's definitely one of the people that I attribute the way that I think about cities to. It is to Toronto's credit that of all the cities in the world, Ms. Jacobs chose to live here - and to that, our city and our profession is losing a great friend and mentor.
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