Dead or Alive at Fifty? Reading Jane Jacobs on her Golden Anniversary

I first encountered The Death and Life of Great American Cities in college. A course on U.S. urban history assigned Jane Jacobs's 1961 bombshell of a book during a discussion of urban renewal, and I was a Jacobsean from that moment forward. I recall the dual sensation of confirmation and revelation. In the first case, Jacobs expressed things I somehow already knew, in an inchoate way, as demonstrated by the pull of vibrant urban places. Yet while she didn't fundamentally change my sensibility, she clarified what was before me. It was almost as if scales fell away from my eyes, and I was really seeing cities only for the first time, understanding the deep connections between everything I saw. In this respect, Jacobs's writing was paradigmatically transformative, and I have hardly framed an urban observation since that day that is not somehow indebted to her ideas. Death and Life is simply that kind of book; once you read it, you seem to forever encounter the urban world on its terms.