Eclectic Curiosity

Jane Jacobs 1916-2006


Posted on April 25th, 2006, by Steve Hardy in Archives, Uncategorized. No Comments

Very sad news from Toronto today: Jane Jacobs has passed away. She was 89.

If you haven’t read her books–most famous of which is the profoundly influential The Death and Life of Great American Cities–you must. She was a gifted writer with brilliant (yet common sense) ideas relating to a surprisingly wide range of topics. Interviews with her conveyed a sharp wit, fiery passion and unflagging curiosity, even in her older years. Jacobs’ books are some of my personal favourites and although I never met her I will miss her dearly. We’ve lost one of our time’s best minds and one most special generalist.


We are living, I am convinced, in one of the most intellectually exciting times the human race has ever gone through. We are emerging from this linear cause-and-effect way of seeing the world into a way that has really been led by the ecologists, into a Web world, beginning to understand relationships in quite a different way. And it is affecting everything. And no end of people have grasped this and are seeing the world differently and analyzing things differently and seeing possibilities differently–basically in a very hopeful way. And I think this is awfully exciting. People who are younger than I am, you are lucky. You can play a part in what I think can be an extremely hopeful stage.

A few past CG posts about Jane Jacobs here, here and here.





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