Even a decade after her death, Jane Jacobs continues to spark crucial conversations about cities and the way we inhabit them. The writer and activist is perhaps best known for her tireless community advocacy and formidable debating skills, both of which contributed to her successful defense of Greenwich Village in the 1960s, when building baron Robert Moses was determined to drop a ten-lane expressway directly through Washington Square Park. Jacobs also penned seven books during her seven-decade-long career; the most famous work is undoubtedly The Life and Death of Great American Cities, now a staple in urban planning curricula across the country. But despite Jacobs’s high public visibility, a full-fledged biography hasn’t appeared until now.
“I first read Life and Death in the 1970s, and it had a great effect on me. Once you understand what she’s saying, it never leaves your head,” says Robert Kanigel, whose 466-page Jacobs biography, Eyes on the Street (Knopf, $35), comes out next week. The idea for the book came to Kanigel (who’s authored seven titles himself) in 2010, when he was a professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kanigel made use of the trove of Jacobs’s papers stored at nearby Boston College and also spoke to a dozen of her family members in order to fully grasp the woman who, after reaching near mythical status in New York, abruptly fled to Toronto. “That’s barely been touched by other writers,” says Kanigel. “She had another whole life in Canada that I explore in depth.” Jacobs’s legacy is also immortalized in Citizen Jane: Battle for the City, a documentary narrated by Marisa Tomei that recently debuted at the Toronto Film Festival.
