Jane Jacobs - Softcover

Alexiou, Alice

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002008327 ISBN 13: 9780002008327

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2007

Synopsis

New Page 1

A Maclean’s national bestseller, now with P.S. the story of a revolutionary thinker whose ideas changed our cities.

When urban planning activist Jane Jacobs died in April 2006, Canada mourned the passing of one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century. But the ideas and insights of her richly packed life of social action including her groundbreaking Death and Life of Great American Cities, written over 40 years ago still resonate. In Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary, journalist Alice Sparberg Alexiou explores the ideas of this incisive, passionately engaged mind and celebrates Jacobs’ contributions to the debates that have directly informed how many of us live today.

From the controversy that erupted when Jacobs dared to take on conventional urban planning wisdom in the 1960s to Jacobs’ immigration to Canada in 1968 and her immeasurable influence on Toronto’s cityscape, as well as her lesser known and equally provocative works on economics, Alexiou offers a thoughtful tribute to the award-winning and inspirational thinker, writer and activist.

About this title

About the Author:

ALICE SPARBERG ALEXIOU holds a masters in journalism fromColumbia University and a Ph.D. in classics from Fordham University. She liveson Long Island, where she has written for several publications, including TheNew York Times and Newsday, and is an editor of Lilith magazine,an independent magazine for Jewish women.

From Publishers Weekly:

Perhaps best known for her activism in preserving Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Jane Jacobs here gets a laudatory biography that focuses largely on her work in New York and, later, in Toronto. Using plenty of primary sources and many of Jacobs's own words, Alexiou provides a journalistically strong recounting of Jacobs's life, though her characterizations of the larger-than-life personalities Jacobs railed against-notably planning powerhouse Robert Moses, who is rarely portrayed as anything except a devious community destroyer-fail to amount to more than simple vilification. Similarly, Alexiou admires Jacobs, and her rah-rah prose gets awfully aggrandizing. ("No company, no individual, no matter how powerful, was off limits to Jacobs. She feared nobody-not even Robert Moses.") However, the blow-by-blow accounts of Jacobs's side of several major urban planning showdowns are immensely readable and will appeal to those interested in the history of urban planning. Photos.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0002008327
• ISBN 13: 9780002008327
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 264