Here, here! I am a true admirer of Jane. My most prized possession is a set of letters we exchanged, and an ink-pen she gave me as a birthday gift for maintaining such an "old-school" means of communication. As a student, and now professional in the realm of Urban Planning I would be among the first to defend the value she brought to field. Yet, I also find no heresy in the notion that to move forward perhaps we also must look at the opposite side of the spectrum and consider the virtues of developing big visions and plans and getting things done. I think the true testament to both Jane's and Robert's legacies will be whether we can learn from both and come up with a viable third way...

The richest country in the world has millions of its residents living in dire poverty,hunger and malnutrition and let's not forget homelessness. That's the reality,folks. Odd, isn't, Empire America can't adequately take care of its own? Little Scandnavian countries do; we don't. But we spend lots of bucks as we plan to go to Mars and feed more bucks into NASA'S coffers, military excess, black budgets, need I go on? Before we go to Mars, let's get our priorities straight, our people, our own US citizens. Let's first space-travel back to Earth and spend the money here. Sure, we have some public housing but not enough.We need more of it where tenants pay only 30 percent of their income for rent. Let towns use their public lands for public housing, donating the land for instance, to the contractor, and having the Federal government, pay for the structures, whatever the procedure would be. I don't have enough knowledge of the details of the process but you get the point, I hope. Let, for example, Beverly Hills, Brookline, use some part of its vast acreage of 18 fairways for public housing. Not in my back yard, of course, will be the outcry fror the opulent elite of South, Suburban Brookline, just as they fought hard against the Town relocating its Town Barn to Southern Brookline on public land, bordering the golf course. Then, of course, let's cast our eyes on the 27 fairways of the elite Brookline Country Club. Hmm, who negotiated that deal so that that vast acreage was used to delight the rich with their need to knock a golf ball into a small hole, and don't forget their race course, now defunct. Another way to keep out public housing was in the contractual agreement between the Town of Brookline and Mrs. Larz Anerson, who donated her vast acres to the Town, only on the condition that there be no housing developent allowed on the premises. Nearby, of course, in keeping with that same philosophy is Allendale Farm, another bulwark designed to keep the tenants of public housing out of its sacred domain. The lock-out program started in 1847. See note below. "Prompted by rumors of UNDESIRED DEVELOPMENT,the neighbors (of the 1847 for-sale land around the Brookline Reservoir),including Amy Lowell,(the poet),John C, Olmsted, Walter Channing,Edward Atkinson,and George Lee,(after whom Lee St. is named)contributed more than $50,000 towards the land's purchase price of $150,000." Reference: Page 13 of "Images of America, Brookline MA," by Greer Harwicke and Roger Reed, 1998.

In many ways, Jacobs romaticized an image of the urban village, were front stoops and proximity to the street was a warm antithesis to the sterility and anomie of post-war urban renewal. She was right in decrying the chrome and glass superblock vision of the 1950s, but her alternative was equally unrealistic when scaled to size of modern American cities. Her real contribution was to move urban planning beyond its architectural heritage and to get planners to think more about how cities work than how they look. Contemporary planning and urban design have become much more humane thanks to Jacobs, even thought these disciplines still do not totally understand the social complexities of urban life. Jane Jacobs may be remembered for her vision of cities composed of human-scale villages, but her real contribution was to question the urban planning of the 50s and 60s as an extension of the city beautiful movement of the early 20th century and the mid-century embrace of the idealized urbanism of Le Corbusier and the sterile architecture of the International Style. In other words, while city planners and urban designers still have only a few answers to what makes a city livable, at least -- thanks much to Jane Jacobs -- they are asking the right questions.