(Vanity) Who is "Jane Jacobs"?

Definitely/ Jacobs’ ideas have been applied spottily here and there but usually badly. I have seen some new street design even here that seems to be on her model but in the wrong part of town for it. instead of preserving a neighborhood it isolates it.

I believe so. I was intrigued with her book because it did present a woman’s point of view in that she presented ideas that a man mostly would not envision. I don’t agree with her ideas about what to accomplish but she presented the rational methods to accomplish those goals. Then again, when politician city planners announce plans to achieve some goal it is a pretty sure bet that the announced goal is not the actual goal which may actually be paying off contractors who supported their elections.

Jane Jacobs Jingleheimer Schmidt?

The politics of this are interesting

Politics, Planning and the Public Interest, 1955, is just one of many books by Meyers and Banfield out of U of Chicago that preceded Jane Jacobs and gave an excellent picture of Democrat coalition politics.

Meyers & Banfield rode with the Planners and Politicians as they drove around Chicago choosing urban renewal locations.

The cynical power hungry (Clinton/Daley) types wanted to located concentrations of rubber stamp Democrat votes on the edges of white wards so the white wards would never go Republican. Common gerrymandering. But the Politicians wanted to make sure the Blacks were separated from the white area by an expressway, railroad viaduct, etc that would mark the limit of Black area expansion.

The idealist ADA/IPI Democrats (Bernie types) wanted to concentrate poor people in homogenous and monotonous housing. The goal was to design housing for the most efficient deployment of social services. Thus all unmarried mothers were to be concentrated in one complex. Poor families with men present were to be concentrated in another complex. Senior citizens (who didn’t threaten neighbors as much) would be concentrated far from the families.

Thus, by intent the extended family structure of grandparents and aunts watching ALL the kids while other family members worked was totally destroyed. Also destroyed was the extended family based church.

Busing was totally unsynched to urban planning. Busing destroyed the neighborhood school and the local churches which were the backbone of the neighborhood school in the community.

And we wonder why we now have problems?

In Chicago in the early 60s Al Raby was the most articulate activist with common sense.

I question that urban planning was only illogical in the mid-century. Atlanta’s 1990s (Olympics) development was just as stupid as that of the 1950s and 60s. Atlanta build an expensive rapid transit system where the North-South and East-West lines cross in downtown. But the planners insisted on open space and small 1 story shops around the rapid transit intersection. They prevented high rise office buildings in the area.

The intersection of rail lines should have the highest concentration of employees riding the rail... commuters.
But the rail lines are mostly empty because they dont lead to the employment center like they should.

That has been topped in 2012-2017 with Mr Rogers Trolley. The taxpayer (stimulus, etc) subsidy for a Trolley rider to go 1 mile is in the many hundreds of dollars per rider mile. And the planners want to double down on the Trolley.

Jacobs was an early "small is beautiful" thinker, an opponent of urban renewal and the "soulless" city planning of the "brutalist" mid-20th century. She wanted cities to grow naturally and not be forced into bureaucrats' plans.

William F. Buckley put one of her articles in his anthology of 20th century American conservative thinking, even though she wasn't a conservative politically, and even left the US for Canada during the Vietnam War.