Jane Jacobs – författare

I Sverige är Jane Jacobs mest känd för att ha revolutionerat den moderna stadsbyggnadsdebatten med boken Life and Death of Great American Cities. Men Jacobs intresse för städers dynamik ledde också till flera betydelsefulla arbeten om ekonomi. I Den spontana staden presenteras för första gången ekonomen Jane Jacobs för en svensk publik.

Economy och Cites (1970) och Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984) var banbrytande verk, som för första gången på ett systematiskt sätt analyserade städer som täta centrum för marknader, kunskapsutveckling och nyföretagsamhet. Det är med direkt inspiration från de två böckerna som Robert Lucas, Richard Florida och Edward Glaeser sedan fortsatte att arbeta med teoriutveckling om städers betydelse för den moderna ekonomins utveckling.

"Förmodligen finns det ingen enskild tänkare som under de senaste femtio åren har gjort mer för att förändra våra idéer om stadslivets förutsättningar." - Chicago Tribune

Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and keenly detailed, a monumental work that provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities."The most refreshing, provacative, stimulating and exciting study of this [great problem] which I have seen. It fairly crackles with bright honesty and common sense." —The New York TimesA direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century, The Death and Life of Great American Cities has, since its first publication in 1961, become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured.In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity. 

Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of its initial publication, this special edition of Jane Jacobs’s masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, features a new Introduction by Jason Epstein, the book’s original editor, who provides an intimate perspective on Jacobs herself and unique insights into the creation and lasting influence of this classic. The Death and Life of Great American Cities was described by The New York Times as “perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning. . . . [It] can also be seen in a much larger context. It is first of all a work of literature; the descriptions of street life as a kind of ballet and the bitingly satiric account of traditional planning theory can still be read for pleasure even by those who long ago absorbed and appropriated the book’s arguments.” Jane Jacobs, an editor and writer on architecture in New York City in the early sixties, argued that urban diversity and vitality were being destroyed by powerful architects and city planners. Rigorous, sane, and delightfully epigrammatic, Jane Jacobs’s tour de force is a blueprint for the humanistic management of cities. It remains sensible, knowledgeable, readable, and indispensable.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities durchleuchtet Jane Jacobs 1961 die fragwürdigen Methoden der Stadtplanung und Stadtsanierung in Amerika, der "New Yorker" nannte es das unkonventionellste und provozierendste Buch über Städtebau seit langem. Die deutsche Ausgabe wurde schnell auch im deutschsprachigem Raum zu einer viel gelesenen und diskutierten Lektüre. Sie ist jetzt wieder in einem Nachdruck zugänglich, mit einem Nachwort von Gerd Albers (1993), das nach der Aktualität dieser Streitschrift fragt.