Godmother Of The American City

"Jane Jacobs on Lewis Mumford, Ed Logue, Robert Moses, the atrocities of urban renewal, and the resiliency of cities... A decade later she seized the imagination of an otherwise extremely complacent era when she declared so starkly in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that the experiment of Modernist urbanism was a thumping failure. Jacobs urged Americans to look to the traditional wisdom of the vernacular city and its fundamental unit?the street?rather than the planning gurus. This was the first shot in a war that has been ongoing ever since. Decades later her book become one of the seminal texts of the New Ur-banism (along with the work of Lewis Mumford, who was at first a supporter of hers and then an adversary after publication of her landmark book)."