VOA

VOICE ONE:

I'm Steve Ember.

VOICE TWO:

And I'm Barbara Klein with PEOPLE IN AMERICA in VOA Special English. Today we tell about Jane Jacobs. She was an activist for improving cities.

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VOICE ONE:

Jane Jacobs

She opposed the kind of city planning that involves big development and urban renewal projects that tear down old communities. She was also a critic of public planning officials who were unwilling to compromise.

Jacobs helped lead fights to save neighborhoods and local communities within cities. She helped stop major highways from being built, first in New York City and later in Toronto, Canada.

Developers and city planners often criticized her ideas. Yet, many urban planning experts agree that her work helped shape modern thinking about cities.

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VOICE TWO:

Jane Butzner was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in nineteen sixteen. Her father was a doctor. Her mother was a former teacher and nurse. After graduating from high school, Jane took an unpaid position at the Scranton Tribune newspaper. A year later she left Scranton for New York City.

During her first several years in the city she held many kinds of jobs. One job was to write about workers in the city. She said these experiences gave her a better idea about what working in the city was like.

As a young woman, Jacobs had many interests, including economics, law, science and politics. Her higher education was brief, however. She studied for just two years at Columbia University in New York. Jacobs did not complete her college education, but she did become an excellent writer and editor. While working as a writer for the Office of War Information she met a building designer named Robert Jacobs.

In nineteen forty-four, they married. They later had three children. Her husband's work led to her interest in the monthly magazine, Architectural Forum. Jacobs became a top editor for the publication.

VOICE ONE:

Experts have described Jacobs as a writer who wrote well, but not often. She is best known for her book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities." The book was published in nineteen sixty-one. It is still widely read today by both city planning professionals and the general public.

Experts say "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" is the most influential book written about city planning in the twentieth century.

In the book, Jacobs criticized the urban renewal projects of the nineteen fifties. She believed these policies destroyed existing inner-city communities and their economies.

She also thought that modern planning policies separated communities and created unnatural city areas. Jacobs described the nature of cities – their streets and parks, the different cultures represented by citizens and the safety of a well-planned city. Safety was an important issue in big cities that had high rates of crime.

Jacobs wrote that peace on the streets of cities is not kept mainly by the police even though police are necessary. It is kept by a system of controls among the people themselves. She believed the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by spreading people out more thinly.

Jacobs argued that a well-used city street is safer than an empty street. Safety, she argued, is guaranteed by people who watch the streets every day because they use the streets every day.

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VOICE TWO:

"The Death and Life of Great American Cities" became a guide for neighborhood organizers and the people who Jacobs called "foot people." These are citizens who perform their everyday jobs on foot. They walk to stores and to work. They walk to eating places, theaters, parks, gardens and sports stadiums. They are not who Jacobs called "car people" – those who drive their cars everywhere.
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