Throughout her career, social activist and urban writer Jane Jacobs (May 4, 1916 – April 25, 2006) fought against corporate globalization and urged post-war urban planners and developers to remember the importance of community and the human scale. Despite having no formal training, she radically changed urban planning policy through the power of observation and personal experience. Her theories on how design can affect community and creativity continue to hold relevance today—influencing everything from the design of mega-cities to tiny office spaces.
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), her most well-known publication, Jacobs critiqued the short-sightedness of urban planners in the 1950s and argued that their assumptions about what makes a good city are actually detrimental to the human experience. For example, she contended that the creation of automobile infrastructure results in the unnatural division of pre-existing neighborhoods, creating unsafe environments and thereby severing community connections. In the years leading up to her death, she discussed ways in which communities could recover what they lost as a result of poor foresight in earlier city planning efforts.
