Jane Jacobs Essays

  • Jane Jacobs: The Misunderstood Urban Planning Icon

    1876 Words  | 4 Pages

    Gender and the Urban Planning Community’s Reactions to Jane Jacobs In April, 1956, Jane Jacobs spoke before a crowd of architects, academics, and urban planners at the Harvard Urban Design Conference. Five years later, she would publish The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a book that tore down contemporary city planning and lead to the profession being rebuilt in Jacobs’s image (or, rather, in the image of people claiming to be rebuilding the profession in her image – as Max Page

  • Jane Jacobs

    550 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an avant-garde urbanist whose writings encouraged a fresh outlook to city planning. Even though she had no formal training as a city planner, “The Death and Life of great American cities” is still one of the most prominent books on urban planning in which she presents innovative thinking about how cities function, develop and fail. Jacobs explains how cities should function as cohesive systems in which they have their own logic and ‘vitality’ which inevitably adjusts overtime

  • Jane Jacobs Motivation

    2322 Words  | 5 Pages

    Jane Jacobs was an avid writer and a fervent activist in getting her opinions heard. She single handedly influenced the way people saw urban planning without any traditional schooling in architecture. Her lack of schooling gave a critics a big platform on which to attack her credentials, however this did not deter her from what she set out to accomplish. She was relentless in attacking current city planning principles and was definitely a force to be reckoned with. Although she had her fair share

  • The Influence Of Jane Jacobs

    1349 Words  | 3 Pages

    New York City have come to love is greatly indebted to a woman named Jane Jacobs. This woman of short stature was able to fight off wealthy men who wielded great influence in New York with the stroke of her pen, and a sign in her hand. Without Jane Jacobs New York City would be a vastly different landscape made up of ten lane highways, and vast tracts of empty space if men like Robert Moses and Ebenezer Howard had their way.

  • Naked City By Sharon Zukin Summary

    1315 Words  | 3 Pages

    gets lost because she focusing too much to detail. She spends a good portion of the book critiquing Jane Jacobs book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Although I think it’s important that Zukin provided a different view on the crisis of authenticity, I felt she focused a little too much on trying to argue against Jane Jacobs. In her conclusion she critiques Jacobs work, saying that Jacobs views are bias (227). Zukin could have made her thesis sound by incorporating visuals to show the roles

  • Jane Jacobs Community Plan

    591 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jane Jacobs recommended four factors of effective city neighborhood planning: 1) to nurture lively and interesting streets, 2) to create continuous network of streets, 3) to use parks, open spaces and public buildings as part of the street design, encouraging multiple uses rather than segregating them, 4) to foster functional identity at the district level. Her description of successful city neighborhoods challenged Clarence Perry’s Neighborhood Unit Plan which relied on a fixed community scale.

  • The Use Of Sidewalks By Jane Jacobs

    897 Words  | 2 Pages

    “The Use of Sidewalks.” Jane Jacobs. 1. What essential question is the author addressing? How sidewalks are the most public and important parts of the city, and how we as citizens/neighbors watching it (eyes on the streets) constitute a vital component of urban and suburban street’s security and comfort. 2. What is the thesis being examined or proposed, in what context? One of the most important aspects of an environment is the safety of it, if the users feel secure, safe, and comfortable

  • Jane Jacobs The Image Of The City

    2443 Words  | 5 Pages

    districts, nodes, landmarks. In particular, streets are an important part of the receptacle for everyday life. Many social activities happen along street, such as ‘trading, shopping, learning, playing, and interaction with neighbours and strangers’, as Jane Jacobs’ description of “the ballet of Hudson Street” that

  • Jane Jacobs New Urbanism

    754 Words  | 2 Pages

    well as non-commercial relation. This hints to ideas of Jane Jacobs in her ideas of what diversity in a city and urban area entailed, when she claimed that “something about buildings needing variation in uses, primary uses.” She claimed a need for buildings to have variation in uses as well as age, which seems to be part of the ideals of the New Urbanist movement. It provided for diversity economically as well as socially, something Jacobs advocated for in order for a community to be successful

  • Art And Life By Jane Jacobs Summary

    585 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jane Jacobs begins chapter nineteen with an in-depth consideration based on the visual order: its limitations and possibilities. When designing cities, it comes with dealing with people’s lives when it is most complex and intense. However, it must be noted that a city cannot be a work of art. They need art, but can’t be viewed as a structural problem and be viewed with visual work based on art. The reason why we need art is to reassure us of our humanity. Art and life are intermixed but are not exactly

  • Learning Responsibility On City Sidewalks, By Jane Jacobs

    663 Words  | 2 Pages

    What Parents Need to Know about Playgrounds The essay, “Learning Responsibility on City Sidewalks” by Jane Jacobs, gives insight into the positive aspects that come out of neighborly interaction and expresses how the creation of playgrounds within the community can taint a child’s upbringing. The use of playgrounds is said to lead to a lack of joint responsibility which can have an influence on the youth within a community. The author feels that parks do not benefit pubescents in same the way that

  • Death And Life Of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs

    1759 Words  | 4 Pages

    Jane Jacobs may have been far ahead of her time in her ideas on city planning when she wrote, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. When she wrote this book in 1961 she bluntly opens her book stating that the book “is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding” [Jacobs, 5] and that in the book she wants to “attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning”

  • The Death And Life Of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs

    891 Words  | 2 Pages

    cities Description The book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, written by Jane Jacobs provided different ideas related to neighborhoods and districts. However, many people disregarded her ideas due to lack of planning qualification and professional architecture. The book was divided in four main parts, where the ideas related to cities are criticizes. In part first, ‘The Peculiar Natures of Cities’ Jacobs introduced ideas at micro level such as side walk safety, importance of public characters

  • The Life and Death of Great American Cities by Jane Jacob

    908 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly

  • Death And Life Of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs

    1671 Words  | 4 Pages

    Jane Jacobs was not an urban planner, but her ideas have influenced urban planners all over the world and continue to be the basis of city planning today. Jacobs was, by profession, an urban writer and activist. In her novel, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs details her ideas and theories of urban planning, what makes it successful and what to watch out for. Jacobs emphasized the importance of making public spaces “usable” and enabling locations to be people friendly so citizens

  • Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room - Jacob Flanders, Many Things to Many Readers

    4385 Words  | 9 Pages

    Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room - Jacob Flanders, Many Things to Many Readers Listless is the air in an empty room, just swelling the curtain; the flowers in the jar shift. One fibre in the wicker arm- chair creaks, though no one sits there. - Jacob's Room The year 1922 marks the beginning of High Modernism with the publications of T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. Woolf's novel, only her third, is not generally afforded the iconic worship

  • Analysis Of Jane Jacobs The Death And Life Of Great American Cities

    1096 Words  | 3 Pages

    At the time Jane Jacobs was writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities, city planning was not a process done by or for the people who lived in them. Residents were rarely consulted or involved in decision making, rather it be left to few elites who dictated their vision of the city for everybody else to conform to. This is clearly illustrated in her conflicts with Robert Moses, an outspoken Yale educated city planner operating in New York, where Jacobs was living at the time. Moses had

  • The Death And Life Of Great American Cities By Jane Jacobs

    1255 Words  | 3 Pages

    Jane Jacobs, in the chapter “The kind of problem a city is” from her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” explains the three stages of development in the history of scientific thought including (1) ability to deal with problems of simplicity (2) ability to deal with problems of disorganized complexity and (3) ability to deal with problems of organized complexity. She goes on to describe how the realization of the appropriate category of scientific thought can impact different professional

  • Brothers of the Bible

    1633 Words  | 4 Pages

    Brothers of the Bible The Old Testament sibling rivalries between Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, and Joseph and his brothers were similar in some ways and different in others, but they all hold lessons for us today, for brothers today still face many of the same problems in life that challenged brothers thousands of years ago. Cain and Abel were in a situation much more unique than Esau and Jacob, and Joseph and his brothers faced, for the society they lived in was extremely small, and they

  • Asymmetric Epoxidation Of Dihydronaphthalene With A Synthesized Jacobs

    2194 Words  | 5 Pages

    Asymmetric Epoxidation of Dihydronaphthalene with a Synthesized Jacobsen's Catalyst Abstract. 1,2 diaminocyclohexane was reacted with L-(+)-tartaric acid to yield (R,R)-1,2-diaminocyclohexane mono-(+)-tartrate salt. The tartrate salt was then reacted with potassium carbonate and 3,5-di-tert-butylsalicylaldehyde to yield (R,R)-N,N'-Bis(3,5-di-tert-butylsalicylidene)-1,2-cyclohexanediamine, which was then reacted with Mn(OAc)2*4H2O and LiCl to form Jacobsen's catalyst. The synthesized