Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs, OC, O.Ont ( born May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania as Jane Butzner, † April 25, 2006 in Toronto ) was an American-born Canadian non-fiction writer, urban and architectural critic.
Life
In the 1950s and early 1960s, she lived in New York City's Greenwich Village. Around the year 1960 a large-scale site remediation should be carried out there. This would have had the loss of over 80 % of the available, mixed and grown buildings and the displacement of thousands of residents, including many artists and craftsmen, the consequence. Following the same scheme since the early 1940s, a large number had been carried out by surface renovations under the aegis of Robert Moses in New York. The existing three - to five -story block building was always largely complete by 10 - to 18 -storey replaced, detached residential towers with same old brick facades. These remedial measures has always been about Slumbeseitigung, so the areas between the new high-rise buildings were often planted quite complicated; also it came to reduce the extremely high population density of the affected quarter before the renovations in the rule. In this way, for example, almost all the buildings on the Lower East Side along the East River was completely replaced in the south of Manhattan within a few years by new buildings. After about 1960, now Greenwich Village was officially declared a " slum ", the district threatened with a similar fate as the Lower East Side. It is largely thanks to Jane Jacobs, that there for the first time increased civic movement emerged that united the very different inhabitants of the district with the aim to prevent the destruction of the neighborhood. In 1962, this goal was achieved. Could not be prevented, of course, that in the context of gentrification ( appreciation through renovation) in the coming decades, rents always reached new heights and many of the residents so still forced to pull out of their village.
Since 1969, she lived with her husband, architect Robert H. Jacobs, Jr. ( † 1996) in Toronto, Canada. The couple has two sons, James and Ned, as well as the daughter of Mary Jacobs. Even in her new hometown, she was active very quickly in urban issues. They could, for example, contribute to the prevention of the planned Spadina Expressway there.
Topics
Their most important work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities ( Death and Life of Great American Cities ) appeared in 1961. In this pamphlet they protested against the prevailing urban planning of the time. She criticized the loss of mature urban structures - with their urban mixtures of different uses of the buildings - and the practice of urban planning, which seemed to be based on the classic modern and living, working, leisure, etc. according to the pattern of Garden City and " ville radieuse " tried to separate.
Instead, they called for a diverse mixed development within a street, a wide range of different buildings in a quarter, enabling vibrant neighborhoods and small-scale, unplanned neighborhoods. So she made the need location of the postwar period, had been leveled entire neighborhoods previously under the slogan "Urban Renewal" and latched into the grid of the metropolis as a car-friendly building blocks back in, whereas the published opinion now increasingly incurred losses took in the view. Their importance as urban design critic in the United States is comparable to that of the 1982 deceased Alexander Mitscherlich ( The inhospitality of our cities; theses on the city of the future ) in the German -speaking world. There Jacobs influenced among other things, Wolf Jobst Siedler, who later published the murdered city.
Works
- The Death and Life of Great American Cities 1961, ISBN 067974195X In German: Death and Life of Great American Cities, translated by Eva gardener, Bauwelt foundations Volume 4, Ullsteinhaus, Berlin, 1963, Friedrich Vieweg & Sohn Verlag, Braunschweig, 1993, ISBN 3-764-36356-8