Jane Jacobs image from Project for Public Spaces
If you remember our organizational mantra for 2025, introduced at our November 2024 AGM, is to Learn -> Do -> Share. To that end we’re going to try and feature something in each category for every month this year. The ‘Learn Challenge’ is one that we hope you’ll enjoy.
You may have heard of Jane Jacobs – I don’t know if the moniker ‘mother of placemaking’ is accurate but there is no denying that Jacobs and her writing are at the foundation of much of what we today call placemaking.
January’s Learn Challenge is to learn about Jane Jacobs. I’m not going to give you her biographical details here – you can find those easily enough – rather I’m going to give you some more interesting resources to check out:
- Jacobs most famous book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) – you can certainly get it from the library and keep your eyes open for it secondhand
- Citizen Jane – Battle for the City – a 2016 documentary film available on Knowledge or through the Greater Victoria Public Library on Kanopy
- Empire City: New York in the 1980s – a 1985 (!) documentary that features not only Jacobs but Donald Trump – its description on Kanopy is more than a little dated and politically incorrect but it could be an interesting watch – just remember to keep in mind when it was made
- City Limits – a 1971 (!) 28-minute documentary by Laurence Hyde for Canada’s National Film Board that features Jacobs as the main character who offers “forthright, critical analysis of the problems and virtues of North American cities. Jacobs orients her fascinating observations around Toronto, to which she moved after leaving New York City because Toronto “is a city that still has options … it hasn’t made so many mistakes that it’s bound to go downhill.” Watch City Limits on NFB
- Jacobs wrote many other books – again Google is your friend – and an interesting one that she didn’t write is Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took on New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City by Anthony Flint (2009 – available at the library)
If you find interesting resources that I’ve missed please let us know by sending an email to info@victoriaplacemaking.ca or writing a blog post to tell us what you learned and what relevance (if any) you think Jacobs’s works and ideas have in terms of the challenges facing us in the cities of today: https://victoriaplacemaking.ca/blog-for-us
Guest Author Bio
Susan Martin (she/her) is a lifelong learner who takes her lessons not only from academia but from the people, places and nature she encounters every day as she gets around her neighbourhood and city on foot or transit. Since October 2020 she has been helping to support those sheltering in Victoria’s parks and wants to see placemaking enhance public spaces for everyone, not just those lucky enough to have a home in the ‘nice’ part of town. Susan is also deeply concerned about climate change and believes that in walkable, welcoming and human-scaled neighbourhoods people will have lower emission lifestyles not because they are consciously deciding to do so but because it just makes sense and is safe, easy and less expensive to bike, walk or roll rather than using a car.
