Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview

& Other Conversations

Jane Jacobs

“Jane Jacobs is the kind of writer who produces in her readers such changed ways of looking at the world that she becomes an oracle, or final authority.” —The New York Sun

Hailed by the New York Times Book Review as “perhaps the single most influential work in the history of town planning,” Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities was instantly recognized as a masterpiece upon its publication in 1961. In the decades that followed, Jacobs remained a brilliant and revered commentator on architecture, urban life, and economics until her death in 2006. These interviews capture Jacobs at her very best and are an essential reminder of why Jacobs was—and remains—unrivaled in her analyses and her ability to cut through cant and received wisdom.

JANE JACOBS was the legendary author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, a work that has never gone out of print and that transformed the disciplines of urban planning and city architecture. Her other major works include The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, The Nature of Economies, and Dark Age Ahead.She died in 2006.

Praise for Jane Jacobs

“One of the most trenchant observers and challenging critics of American culture and character.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“There’s no writer more lucid than Jane Jacobs, nobody better at using wide-open eyes and clean courtly prose to decipher the changing world around us. . . . It’s a tribute to Jacobs that her observations still resonate, succinct yet dead on.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“It’s hard to disagree with Jane Jacobs.” —Washington Post