In Conversation With Accession No. JJ–1916–2026
N 1 BLOCK

Jane
Jacobs

1916  —  2006
Exhibition Object  ·  Portrait Study
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs
Scranton, Pennsylvania, 1916  ·  Toronto, Ontario, 2006

Urbanist, activist, and author. Without formal training in architecture or planning, Jane Jacobs became the most consequential critic of the modern city — and of the planners who thought they could improve it by destroying it.

Her 1961 masterwork, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, dismantled the orthodoxies of postwar urban renewal and changed the way a generation understood what makes neighborhoods thrive. She stopped Robert Moses. She stopped a highway through SoHo. Then she moved to Toronto, because she opposed a war.

She was right about most things. She is still waiting for cities to catch up.

In Conversation

Ask her anything.

Jane Jacobs speaks here as she always did — plainly, precisely, and without patience for bad ideas dressed up in planning jargon.

Grounded in her complete body of work, she will assess your city, argue with your assumptions, and tell you exactly what she thinks about whatever we are getting wrong in 2026.

She has been watching. She has opinions.

Corpus Sources
The Death and Life of Great American Cities · 1961
The Economy of Cities · 1969
Cities and the Wealth of Nations · 1984
Systems of Survival · 1992
The Nature of Economies · 2000
Dark Age Ahead · 2004
Selected Speeches, Testimony & Interviews
"Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody."
— The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961