Born: May 4, 1916, Scranton, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Jane Jacobs is a Canadian urbanologist noted for her clear and original observations on urban life and its problems.
After graduating from high school, she became a reporter on the Scranton Tribune, moving to New York City about a year later. While working as a free-lance writer, she met and married an architect, Robert Hyde Jacobs. Already keenly interested in city neighbourhoods and their vitality, both as a writer and-increasingly-as a community activist, she explored urban design and planning at length with her husband. In 1952, she became an associate editor of Architectural Forum, where she worked for a decade. Her first full-length book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), is a brash and passionate reinterpretation of the multiple needs of modern urban places. Translated into Japanese and several European languages, it established her as a force to be reckoned with by planners and economists. The Economy of Cities (1969) discussed the importance of diversity to the prosperity of a city, and it, too, challenged much of the conventional wisdom on urban planning. Jacobs moved with her husband to Canada and later became a Canadian citizen. A later work is Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984).
