Jane Jacobs, champion of the spontaneous life of cities and radical critic of government urban planning, died yesterday at age 89. Through her many books and the conduct of her life, no one did more to describe the nature of the city as a free unplanned order or to expose the pretensions of social engineers. Her earliest influential books are The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) and The Economy of Cities (1969). She published several more, including Dark Age Ahead (2004).
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
–Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
FEE Timely Classics
Review of Jane Jacobs's Cities and the Wealth of Nations by John Chamberlain
Review of Jane Jacobs's Systems of Survival by Peter J. Boettke
See also the Washington Post and New York Times obituaries.