Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations

by Jane Jacobs

Overview

“Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority.” —The New York Sun

Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning,” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instantly recognized as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1961. In the decades that followed, Jacobs remained a brilliant and revered commentator on architecture, urban life, and economics until her death in 2006. These interviews capture Jacobs at her very best and are an essential reminder of why Jacobs was—and remains—unrivaled in her analyses and her ability to cut through cant and received wisdom.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612195346
Publisher:	Melville House Publishing
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Last Interview Series
Pages:	128
Sales rank:	1,108,840
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

JANE JACOBS was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that has never gone out of print and that transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, The Nature of Economies, and Dark Age Ahead. She died in 2006.

Table of Contents

Disturber of the Peace: Jane Jacobs: Interview by Eve Auchincloss Nancy Lynch 1

How WeStWay Will Destroy New York: Interview by Roberta Brandes Gratz Expanded from New York February 6, 1978 21

Godmother of the American City: Interview by James Howard Kunstler Expanded from Metropolis March 2001 47

The Last Interview: Interview by Robin Philpot from the Question of Separatism (Baraka Books, 2011) May 2, 2005 105

Editorial Reviews

05/02/2016
This collection of four lively exchanges with Jacobs (1916–2006), the doyenne of urban planning, encompasses the boon of sharpened reflections on those topics that were her focus and novel thoughts on those that were not. In an interview for the October 1962 issue of Mademoiselle, conducted shortly after the publication of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jacobs extols "informed, intelligent improvisation" as the formula for great urban development: "All plans—business, your children's education, whatever—are made like this, playing it by ear all along the way." Later interviews offer rarer insights. Speaking to Roberta Brandes Gratz about Manhattan's 1976 Westway project, she points similar efforts of proponents of Lower Manhattan Expressway in the 1960s to present the project as a housing scheme: "The grandiose land-development scheme is a red herring to sell the project." She argues that development would happen without a new highway, and time has vindicated her view. A lengthy interview with James Howard Kunstler features a retelling of her sole encounter with Robert Moses and musings on the planning fever that gripped the architecture world at mid-century: "Intelligent people, to a great extent, are captives of their time and place." Her last interview, conducted in 2005 by Robin Philpot, offers some more unexpected thoughts: sympathy for the Quebec independence movement, hostility to the Euro, and other proof of her taste for decentralization far beyond urban plans. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Some of the most striking insights and advisories from the essential urban visionary.” —CityLab

"This collection of four lively exchanges with Jacobs, the doyenne of urban planning, encompasses the boon of sharpened reflections on those topics that were her focus and novel thoughts on those that were not." —Publishers Weekly

Praise for Jane Jacobs

“Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority.” —The New York Sun
 
“One of the most trenchant observers and challenging critics of American culture and character.” —The Christian Science Monitor
 
“There’s no writer more lucid than Jane Jacobs, nobody better at using wide-open eyes and clean courtly prose to decipher the changing world around us. . . . It’s a tribute to Jacobs that her observations still resonate, succinct yet dead on.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“It’s hard to disagree with Jane Jacobs.” —Washington Post

From the Publisher