Jane Jacobs's Battles - And Yours

Jane Jacobs’s activism took many forms — including reacting to other’s proposals, proactive planning, and coalition building. In 1958, she learned of plans to expand the roadway that bisected Washington Square Park. Certain that this would destroy the park’s character, she joined with other residents to make the radical proposal to discontinue all traffic through the park. And in 1961, just as Jacobs’s ideas were being disseminated in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, her own street was targeted for urban renewal. She soon adopted many of the basic tools of organization that activists use today: meetings, petitions, letter writing, and press outreach. Once Jacobs and her neighbors defeated the urban-renewal plan, they refocused and developed proactive plans to keep housing affordable — and the community diverse — in the face of inevitable development.

When the city was threatening to build an expressway through lower Manhattan in the early 1960s, Jane Jacobs became chair of a broad coalition fighting it. The group asserted, “Downtown is for people, not cars!” Jacobs was arrested for her actions in this role, but the coalition eventually prevailed. Today, Jane Jacobs’s example inspires new generations of activists to use a variety of tools to fight for social and political transformation.