Scott Carlson: On Jane Jacobs's legacy

In his 1962 New Yorker review of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the architecture critic Lewis Mumford credited Jane Jacobs for her much-needed criticism of so-called urban renewal, which was reducing whole sections of cities to "gargantuan nonentities," as he put it. But other than that, he generally found her book simplistic and fraught with factual errors. Jacobs — who had no urban-planning background, or even a college degree — aimed her criticisms at New York, which she believed was being brought to its knees through bad urban design. "As one who has spent more than 50 years in New York," wrote Mumford, "I must remind Mrs. Jacobs that many parts of the city she denounces because they do not conform to her standards were for over the better part of a century both economically quite sound and humanly secure."

In Block By Block: Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York (Princeton Architectural Press), a slim collection of short essays that celebrates the Cassandra of urban renewal, poor Mumford is mentioned only as that guy who maligned a classic. Factually challenged or not, The Death and Life of Great American Cities lands on a number of lists as one of the best books of the 20th century. It galvanized the public around the notions of human-scale sidewalks, parks, and neighborhoods made for natural interactions between people, and it was the antithesis to the grand urban visions of a power broker like Robert Moses. Christopher Klemek, an assistant professor of history at George Washington University, writes in the opening essay that New York's recent rapid growth has people calling for a new Robert Moses....