On Reading Jane Jacobs...Finally

"Despite the fact that I consider myself a hard-core urbanist steeped in the gospel of Jane Jacobs, until recently I had never actually read her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities..."

"I decided to read it—really read it—about a year ago, after New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff pinned opposition to developer Bruce Ratner's Atlantic Yards megaproject in Brooklyn on "acolytes of urbanist Jane Jacobs." Predictably I didn’t sit down with the book until after Jacobs died in April."

"The Jacobs I thought I knew—an advocate for small-scale thinking and an opponent of large-scale projects—is not the one I discovered when I actually began to read her text."