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.
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