How Best To Remember Jane Jacobs?

"Jane Jacobs, we miss you.

In New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared June 28, 2006, Jane Jacobs Day. And there was a memorial at Washington Square, that great place of spontaneous human gatherings, which you helped to save by preventing the lower Manhattan Expressway. There are panels to discuss your work, and author Roberta Gratz has established the Center for the Living City in NYC to promote your ideas about architecture of difference, texture and human scale.

So, Jane, what would you like us [Canadians] to do? Toronto and, indeed, the rest of Canada have been politely, respectfully, almost eerily quiet. Where are the discussion groups and the think tanks?

Perhaps -- given Jacobs's penetrating insights and knack for observing the dubious intentions of institutions, this is the safest route to follow -- and the one that the protocol office at the City of Toronto has embraced...But something needs to be done to keep our conversation alive with Jacobs.

What matters is an initiative that helps us to carry on learning from Jacobs -- to allow us to plunge back into her texts. A centre dedicated to her ideas and community activism could do that. A centre for urban ecology is an idea being seriously floated by her long-time friends and colleagues Margie Zeidler and Mary Rowe. Watch for it: The centre could be a fitting and natural extension of Jacobs' work."