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For those who like their Jane Jacobs served neat and short, here, for the first time, is a comprehensive tasting menu of smaller creations by the visionary American-born Canadian urbanist (journalist, historian, economist, activist, etc.), unfiltered and undiluted.
Served chronologically and spanning Jacobs’ seven decades of evolving theory on how cities function and can function better, the offerings in Vital Little Plans include articles from Vogue in the 1930s, Harper’s Bazaar in the ’40s and Architectural Forum in the ’50s.
There are interviews (see Jacobs bristle in a 1993 one-on-one with Canadian journalist David Warren); an early website commentary (1995); and speeches (including one she delivered at a 2001 conference of Canada’s large city mayors in Winnipeg).
There is her "foreword" to a 1952 State Department Loyalty Security Board interrogatory inquiring into her affiliations (she was a target of Cold War campaigns to expose Communists but was, in fact, an independent thinker). There is also an excerpt of a book, unfinished when she died in 2006.
Jacobs’ writing is clear — expressed simply, sometimes lyrically, down-to-earth and based on observation and research — but it is not simple. Some pieces, given their complexity (particularly her economic theories), take time to digest.
The knowledgable editors masterfully provide context in a style as engaging as Jacobs’ own. Samuel Zipp is a historian and academic of American and urban studies at Rhode Island’s Brown University; Nathan Storring is a curator and designer based also in Providence and New York City, with Ontario roots.
Their five "part introductions," prefacing different stages of Jacobs’ writings, describe her life and times concurrent with those works. The writings are balanced between her New York City and Toronto periods.
Their annotations, readily accessible at the foot of the page, succinctly identify persons referenced by Jacobs (tombstone data, career background, their relationship to her) and explain diverse concepts such as New York City’s long-gone pneumatic mail tube system, "new towns" and the Canadian Senate. They cross-reference singular Jacobs ideas, pointing to other of her works, inside and out of Vital Little Plans, where those thoughts originated, are expanded upon, shift and connect.
The collection includes Jacobs’ 1992 new foreword to her most famous book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, republished 31 years after rocking city planners, architects and the public in 1961.
That seminal work appears on the dust jacket of Vital Little Plans as part of an extended subtitle: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, Author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This is doubly curious.
Surely anyone interested in this meaty new volume will have already heard of Jacobs, so Death and Life is hardly a lure. Could a person possibly know that work but not Jane Jacobs?
The editors suggest she may be fading from memory. A reason, they say, for now publishing Little Vital Plans is to "retrieve… her voice for readers who’ve forgotten it or never knew it in the first place."
Jacobs is everywhere in 2016. In addition to Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs, another biography, Becoming Jane Jacobs by Peter L. Laurence is due, as well as another Jacobs collection, Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations.
This year, on the weekend closest to Jacobs’ May 4 birthday, tens of thousands of citizen-explorers across six continents plied local neighbourhoods to celebrate her and her ideas. It was the 10th annual edition of Jane’s Walks, the urban walking tours inspired by Jacobs’ ideas.
Vital Little Plans encourages us to read Jacobs. Short samplings are easier to appreciate and, unlike a select work from her varied collection, provide the full palette of her thought.
We can walk away satisfied with more than mere tropes, good as "sidewalk ballet" and "eyes on the street" will always be.
Gail Perry is a co-founder of the Winnipeg Architecture Foundation and co-creator of a local Jane’s Walk, Plane Jane: A Walk to the Airport.