| that rare type: the fighting planner
Action, Not Just Words
Ms. Jacobs did not limit her impact to words. In 1961, she and other
protestors were removed from a City Planning Commission hearing on an
urban renewal plan for Greenwich Village that they opposed, after they
leapt from their seats and rushed the podium.
In 1968, she was arrested on riot and criminal mischief charges for
disrupting a public meeting on the construction of an expressway that
would have sliced across Lower Manhattan and displaced hundreds of
families and businesses. The police said she had tried to tear up the
stenographer's transcript tape.
The battle against that highway pitted Ms. Jacobs in an uphill fight
against Robert Moses, the autocratic and immensely powerful master
builder of that era. The expressway's opponents won.
Ms. Jacobs moved to Toronto in 1968 out of opposition to the Vietnam War
and to shield her two draft-age sons from military duty, and quickly
enlisted in Toronto's urban battles. No sooner had she arrived than she
led a battle to stop a freeway there.
She became a beloved intellectual pioneer characterized by a dumpling
face, an impish smile, sneakers, bangs and owlish glasses. But Roger
Starr, a former New York City housing administrator and sometime
opponent of Ms. Jacobs, keenly noted the steel just beneath her folksiness.
"What a dear, sweet character she isn't," he said.
After she was removed from the Planning Commission hearing in 1961, her
own words underlined her feistiness. "We had been ladies and gentlemen
and only got pushed around," she said.
But fighting with government, even being arrested with Susan Sontag and
Allen Ginsberg in an antidraft protest, was something she said she had
repeatedly been forced into by "outrageous" governmental actions.
What she hated most about those actions was that they took time away
from her writing, which she said was her way of thinking. And in at
least five fields of inquiry, she thought deeply and innovatively: urban
design, urban history, regional economics, the morality of the economy
and the nature of economic growth.
http://www.metropolismag.com/cda/story.php?artid=1934
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/books/26jacobs.html
http://www.pulse24.com/News/Top_Story/20060425-016/page.asp