“I READ MOST of Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs while riding the bus in Los Angeles. It was a fitting backdrop for Jacobs’s observations on the “physical-economic-ethical processes” that comprise a city.”
“In this recently published book of Jacobs’s short writings and lectures, collected together for the first time and edited by Samuel Zipp and Nathan Storring, we witness a remarkable mind tackle the problems of comprehending and improving the urban sphere.”
“While many of her ideas have now become conventional wisdom in urbanist circles, gathered under the umbrella term of “livability,” the strength, wit, and style of her language endures.”
“Vital Little Plans gathers an excellent range of Jacobs’s thinking for both new readers and those who haven’t picked her up since being assigned The Death and Life of Great American Cities in college.”
“These short essays and lectures present a startling breadth of ideas, and an unflagging advocacy not just for the built environment, but for the human struggles within it.”
“Though she is known as an urbanist, cities were, in many ways, merely a framework that enabled Jacobs to pursue her interest in everything: democracy, law, philosophy, capitalism, ethics, and our species, the future of which she clearly saw taking place in urban locations.”
“In 1984, in a speech she delivered in Amsterdam called “The Responsibilities of Cities,” she stated that “[t]he nation serves as protector, but cities serve as the creators of so much that a nation protects.””
“Jacobs never finished college, nor did she formally study architecture or urban design. (Later, she turned down honorary degrees from 30 institutions.)”
“She was instead able to analyze what worked, and didn’t, through what may seem like a simple method: a keen observation of urban life. She called her walks around the city “unexpected treasure hunts.””
“In a 1956 article in Architectural Forum, where she was an editor, she celebrates “the pavement-pounding city planner” who has a “fascination, on an intimate level, with all details of city life and city relationships, of his consuming curiosity about the way the city develops and changes, of his endless preoccupation with the living city, and — at the bottom of it all — of his affection for the city.””
“This everyday closeness to her subject, as well as her natural eye for detail, gave Jacobs the ability to pit the experiences of average citizens against the orthodoxy and distance of larger powers, be they academic or civic.”
“These pleasurable vignettes exploring the fur, leather, diamond, and flower industries of Manhattan were meant to appeal to the aspiring luxury consumer. In the young Jacobs’s hands, however, they became finely wrought portraits of how these unique cultural and economic systems set their own rhythms and logics.”
“The vastness and interdisciplinarity of Jacobs’s thinking — which soars especially in the later essays and lectures collected in this book — stands out in a media landscape where “successful urban renewal” can be distilled into a million signifying images of a heart drawn in latte foam.”
“It’s rare now for scholars of urban life to pursue the kind of meandering threads of interest that Jacobs permitted herself, and which are so essential for representing the intricately layered life of a city.”
“As she writes in a draft of her final book, a portion of which is reproduced in Vital Little Plans, “we need unlimited independent thinkers with unlimited skepticism and curiosity.””