Latar Belakang pendidikan

Lahir di Pensylvania, 1916. Kebetulan pas perang dunia I (1914-1918)

Pada tahun 1935 sempat depresi, lalu pindah ke brooklyn, new york. Setelah itu pindah lagi ke greenwich village, manhattan. graduated Scranton High School; no college; two years of graduate studies

atColumbia University

Kondisi sosial-ekonomi pada masa tokoh hidup

Riwayat kerja terkait perencanaan

Awalnya bekerja serabutan. Pernah bekerja sebagai penulis freelance dan stenografer, tentang distrik bekerja di kota. Dari pekerjaannya ini, dia jadi punya pemikiran tentang aktivitas-aktivitas yang ada di kota, dan pekerjaan yang ada disitu. (Jacobs tidak pernah mengenyam pendidikan secara formal terkait ilmu planologi)

Pada tahun 1952, Jacobs bekerja di Architectural Forum sebagai Associate Editor dengan bayaran yang cukup lumayan. Ia mencapai kesuksesan dalam waktu singkat disana. Setelah itu Jacobs memulai tugasnya di bidang perencanaan kota dan ‘penyakit kota’.  Lalu pada 1954, dia diberi tugas untuk meng-cover sebuah pembangunan di Philadelphia yang dirancang oleh Edmunc Bacon. Biarpun sang editor berekspektasi akan mendapat cerita yang positif, namun Jacobs malah mengkritik proyek Bacon, bereaksi melawan

Although her editors expected a positive story, Jacobs criticized Bacon's project, reacting against the apparent lack of care shown for the poor African Americans who were directly affected. When Bacon showed Jacobs examples of undeveloped and developed blocks, she was upset to find that "development" seemed to end active community life on the street.[20][21] When Jacobs returned to the offices of Architectural Forum, she began to question the 1950s consensus on urban planning.[22]

In 1955, Jacobs met William Kirk, an Episcopal minister who worked in East Harlem. Kirk came

to the Architectural Forum offices to describe the impact that "revitalization" had on East Harlem,

and he introduced Jacobs to the neighborhood.[23]

In 1956, Jacobs delivered a lecture at Harvard University, standing in for Douglas

Haskell of Architectural Forum.[17] She addressed leading architects, urban planners, and

intellectuals (including Lewis Mumford), speaking on the topic of East Harlem. She urged this

audience to "respect – in the deepest sense – strips of chaos that have a weird wisdom of their

own not yet encompassed in our concept of urban order." Contrary to her expectations, the talk

was received with enthusiasm. But it also marked her as a threat to established urban planners,

real estate owners, and developers.[24][25] Architectural Forum printed the speech that year, along

with photos of East Harlem.[26]

Sepuluh tahun kemudian (1962) sempat jadi direktur pada Joint Committee untuk memberhentikan Manhattan Expressway. Lalu pada tahun 1968 pindah ke The Annex, Toronto lalu bekerja pada sebuah urban activist sampai akhir hayatnya (25 April, 2006)

Daftar karya (desain, skema, buku)

The death and Life of Great American Cities

The Economy of Cities

The Question of Separatism: Quebec and the Struggle over Sovereignty

Cities and the Wealth of NationsSystems of Survival

The Nature of Economies

Dark Age Ahead

Dipenjara 1968

http://www.pps.org/reference/jjacobs-2/

BIOGRAPHYJacobs was born in 1916 in the coal mining town of Scranton,

Pennsylvania, the daughter of a doctor and a former school teacher and

nurse. After graduating from high school, she took an unpaid position as

the assistant to the women’s page editor at the Scranton Tribune. A year

later, in the middle of the Depression, she left Scranton for New York

City. During her first several years in the city she held a variety of jobs,

working mainly as a stenographer and freelance writer, often writing

about working districts in the city. These experiences, she claims, “…

gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what

business was like, what work was like.” While working for the Office of

War Information she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs. In 1952

Jacobs became an associate editor of Architectural Forum, allowing her

to more closely observe the mechanisms of city planning and urban

renewal. In the process, she became increasingly critical of conventional

planning theory and practice, observing that many of the city rebuilding

projects she wrote about were not safe, interesting, alive, or

economically sound. She gave a speech on this issue at Harvard in 1956,

and William H. Whyte invited her to write a corresponding article

in Fortune magazine, titled “Downtown is for People.” In 1961 she

presented these observations and her own prescriptions in the landmark

book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, challenging the

dominant establishment of modernist professional planning and asserting

the wisdom of empirical observation and community intuition. During the

1960s Jacobs also became involved in urban activism, spearheading local

efforts to oppose the top-down neighborhood clearing and highway

building championed by New York City Parks Commissioner Robert

Moses. In 1962 she became the chairman of the Joint Committee to Stop

the Lower Manhattan Expressway, in reaction to Moses’ plans to build a

highway through Manhattan’s Washington Square Park and West Village.

Her efforts to stop the expressway led to her arrest during a

demonstration in 1968, and the campaign is often considered one of the

turning points in the development of New York City. Moses had

previously pushed through the Cross-Bronx Expressway and other

motorways despite neighborhood opposition, and the defeat of the Lower

Manhattan Expressway was an important victory for local community

interests and an instigator of Moses’s fall from power. Jacobs’ harsh

criticism of “slum-clearing” and high-rise housing projects was also

instrumental in discrediting these once universally supported planning

practices. In 1968 Jacobs moved with her family to Toronto, in opposition

to the Vietnam War. In Toronto, she remained an outspoken critic of top-

down city planning. In the early 1970s she helped lead the Stop Spadina

Campaign, to prevent the construction of a major highway through some

of Toronto’s liveliest neighborhoods. She also advocated for greater

autonomy of the City of Toronto, criticized the bloated electric company

Ontario Hydro, supported broad revisions in Toronto’s Official Plan and

other planning policies, and opposed expansion of the Toronto Island

Airport. After publishing The Death and Life of Great American Cities,

her interests and writings broadened, encompassing more discussion of

economics, morals, and social relations. Her subsequent books

include The Economy of Cities (1969); The Question of

Separatism (1980), an analysis of the question of sovereignty for

Quebec; Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), a major study of the

importance of cities and their regions in their nations and thus also in the

global economy; Systems of Survival (1993); and most recently The

Nature of Economies (2000). She became a Canadian citizen in 1974 and

lived in Toronto until her death on April 25th, 2006.