At a public hearing on the proposed expressway in 1968, Jacobs was arrested and later charged with “second-degree riot, inciting to riot and criminal mischief,” according to the New York Times. A similar highway was the subject of what remains perhaps her most famous battle: The Lower Manhattan Expressway, proposed by city planner Robert Moses, which would have been a 10-lane road cutting across what is now SoHo and Little Italy. At the time city planning aimed to make cities orderly, with tall buildings and open space, and had no qualms about demolishing large swaths of neighborhoods to make their ideas reality, as with New York City’s Cross Bronx Expressway. Jacobs was not just a writer who had big ideas, she was also the champion of those ideas in the real world. MORE: Read TME’s 1962 Cover Story on the American Urban Renaissance “This is not the rebuilding of cities,” she wrote. Jacobs argued that urban renewal-tearing down old neighborhoods to build housing developments in their place-was not the answer to the problem of urban slums. The book was highly influential, offering a radically different view from what city planners of the time put forward. It has plenty of room for your essentials. This is the contentious charge of Critic Jane Jacobs in a new, passionately argued and well-documented book ( The Death and Life of Great American Cities), which has planners all shook up. Sakroots handbags and accessories are known for their gorgeous and eye catching prints. Attached to the outmoded ideals of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, they are creating a future wilderness of standardized, monotonous never-never lands.
planners and redevelopers, in trying to save U.S. Over the next three years she developed those ideas into her 1961 book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Walk, and you will see that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong.” Cities, she argued, are not like suburbs and should not be made to appeal to the scale and ideals of the suburbs. In the article she argued that the “magnetism” of cities was what “made people want to come into the city and to linger there.” She told readers: “You’ve got to get out and walk. Her 1958 Fortune article “Downtown is for People” offered an early view of her ideas on city life, what made it worthwhile for both passersby and local residents. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter In fact, she believed, the very qualities that the city planners wanted to squash were what made cities desirable: quirkiness, variety, density and self-regulating community.