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Death and Life of Great American Cities Suggested for Canada Reads

on October 24, 2011 in Jane Jacobs

Readers of CBC Books have chosen 40 non-fiction works they’d like to see compete in next February’s edition of Canada Reads: True Stories CBC’s annual debate.  Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities is one of them.

Canada Reads 2011: True Stories

Other writers on the list include Farley Mowat, Wayne Johnston, M.G. Vassanji, Pierre Berton and Margaret MacMillan. Two of Vancouver writer John Vaillant’s books have been nominated: The Golden Spruce and The Tiger.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (50th Anniversary Edition) Over the past few weeks, avid readers have suggested titles online at CBC Books. Readers must now shorten the list to 10 books, with online voting open until midnight on Oct. 30. Then, the participating celebrity panelists will choose books from the list that most appeal to them for discussion during Canada Reads: True Stories. The upcoming edition is the first time Canada Reads has considered Canadian non-fiction books.

While there are a lot of worthwhile and important books on the list, my fingers are crossed that Jacobs’s book ends up winning.  It is an important book for everybody living in a city to read (and over 85% of Canadian now live in areas. But perhaps most importantly, honoring this book would be a fitting celebration of the 50th anniversary of its publication this year as well as the 5th anniversary of Jane’s passing next spring.

 

You can check out the otehr 39 books under consideration and vote for your top ten on the CBC website.

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Audio Version of the Golden Edition of Death and Life of Great American City

on October 22, 2011 in Jane Jacobs

The Death and Life of Great American Cities: 50th Anniversary Edition

I recently learned that there is a new audio edition of Jane’s Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities. So if you are more a listener than a reader, you now have no excuse not to absorb Jacobs’ wisdom.

Personally, I think it would be cool to listen to the with strolling through my . That way I could make my own observations while listening to Jane’s.

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Jane Jacobs and the Craft of Fiction

on October 17, 2011 in books, Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs

The Guardian’s  is re-reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities to mark the books fiftieth anniversary. While doing so, he comments that Jane Jacobs’s captures not just the rich density of life, but the craft of fiction.

Here are a few passages from his article:

Rereading: by Jane Jacobs

Rigorous and polemical: Jacobs in Washington Square Park, New York, 1963.
Photograph: Fred W McDarrah/Getty Images

Jacobs, who died in 2006, never published any fiction herself, but she certainly had a novelist’s sensitivity to human relations. She argues in Death and Life, for instance, that one of the paradoxical advantages of urban existence is privacy. In contrast to the suburbs, a dense neighbourhood has lots of convenient places to stop and chat, so you can be on friendly terms with dozens of who live or work near your home without ever feeling the slightest obligation to invite any of them inside for tea:

“Under this system, it is possible in a city-street neighbourhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses, explanations, fears of giving offence, embarrassments respecting impositions or commitments, and all such paraphernalia of obligations which can accompany less limited relationships.”

If these things had truly been lost to New York, we would never have got Seinfeld, but the point still stands. How many professional city planners have considered everyday life so carefully that they’ve remembered to take all the nanophysics of social awkwardness into account?

[...]

Plenty of the requirements Jacobs sets out for building a healthy and diverse urban can be applied with real success to building a vivid and plausible fictional . Death and Life, in other words, is a sort of accidental creative writing textbook – perhaps appropriately so, because Jacobs’s beloved West Village was itself full of writers. Early on, Jacobs says:

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvellous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of pavement use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance.”

But the art form of the city is not really dance. The art form of the city, described so well in that passage, is the novel.

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Jane Jacobs on Economies and Nature

on August 22, 2011 in Jane Jacobs, Video

Jane Jacobs talks about her “The Nature of Economies.”  In it, she asserts that economies are governed by the same rules as nature itself. (Originally aired April 2000).

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Jane Jacobs Compares Toronto & Montreal, 1969

on August 10, 2011 in Jane Jacobs, Video

A short television segment from 1969, shortly after Jacobs moved to Canada.

httpvh://www..com/watch?v=f9833TPWSCY

From CBC TV’s “The Way It Is” program, circa 1969, urbanist and author Jane Jacobs compares late 1960s and Montreal on how they have been planned and built, while condemning major highways planned for GTO.

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Watching: Jane Jacobs—Neighborhoods in Action

on July 22, 2011 in Jane Jacobs, Video

A great video produced by the Active Living Network (a project of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation). It features an interview with the goddess herself.  The clip explores the role of the built environment in physical activity and public health.  It’s 9 minutes and 46 seconds VERY well spent).

httpv://www..com/watch?v=Z99FHvVt1G4

I love her support for skateboarding as an important of youth physical activity.  Lots of good aphorisms at the end as well.

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Jane Jacobs in the Age of Twitter

on July 13, 2011 in Jane Jacobs

I came across this post on the neighborhood nomad blog—”a study of our homes, our , & the power of physical places in a virtual world.”

The post makes a lot of interesting points, but the key question for Jane Jacobs students comes in the second paragraph:

What would Jane Jacobs make of these places we live today, of transformations like those on Washington, D.C.’s H St. or the southeast waterfront? Are the evolutions of these places measuring up to her standards for well-functioning city neighborhoods?

And what would Jane Jacobs think of all the time we now spend in our virtual world instead of our physical one? What would Jane Jacobs — an observer so big on the concept of “” — make of how we interact (and often don’t interact) in the age of ?

The post ends by asking: “Would Jane Jacobs tweet about the happy hour special down the block?”

My answer: Probably.

 

Be sure to read the whole thing.

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A Tour of Bob Dylan’s (and Jane Jacobs’) Greenwich Village

on May 27, 2011 in Jane Jacobs, Video

Bob Dylan and jane Jacobs both lived in in the 1960s.  Indeed, this is where Jane got many of her ideas of how a city should work, including here famous aphorism ”’.”

While this video focused on Dylan’s haunts in the Village, it isn’t hard to imagine Jane hanging out and many of them as well.  For example, Both Jane and Bob were known to frequent the White Horse Tavern.  Who knows, maybe they shared a drink or two.

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Hope: Iconic Jane Jacobs

on May 26, 2011 in Jane Jacobs

Poster of Jane Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, patron saint to urbanism, and icon to those who hope for better cities.

Via: Beyond DC

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Jane Jacobs Day—May 4, 2011

on May 18, 2011 in Jane Jacobs, Jane's Walk

Missed this two weeks ago…

 

City of Toronto Proclamation

Jane Jacobs Day: May 4, 2011

WHEREAS this year marks the 5th anniversary of Jane’s Walk, inspired by the lifelong work of Jane Jacobs in which residents meet and mingle on tours of their neighbourhoods. Today, Jane’s Walk takes place in more than 70 cities around the world and there are more than 100 free tours in Toronto this year.

Jane Jacobs was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania and moved to Toronto in 1968. Until her death in 2006, she inspired and taught the world how to understand and value cities, almost single-handedly influencing and transforming our ideas about life.

Jane Jacobs was a writer, outspoken urban activist, a philosopher and an innovator. She observed how cities function and analyzed how can live in a world of conflicting moral principles. Published 50 years ago, her “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” brought into focus the premise that cities are engines of growth and that their vitality stems from the variety of activities people engage in.

Jane Jacobs’ arguments were from the ground up, with in-depth observations of everyday places, teaching us about ‘’ and life on the sidewalk. She believed that walkable, dense, compact and diverse neighbourhoods were the hallmarks of a healthy city where people connect and engage their creative synergies. She had faith in the wisdom of local residents and encouraged us to love and embrace our city.

NOW THEREFORE, I, Mayor Rob Ford, on behalf of Toronto City Council, do hereby proclaim May 4, 2011 as “Jane Jacobs Day” and recognize that Jane’s Walk, honours a great Torontonian, Jane Jacobs – one of the foremost urban thinkers and activists of our times.

 

Mayor Rob Ford
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