‘Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,’ by Robert Kanigel

Jane Jacobs has had more influence on how we think about cities than anyone else since World War II, or at least since 1962, when her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” made a case for the messy vitality of old-fashioned neighborhoods at a time when clean-slate urban renewal was all the rage.

[...] notions as the value of shops and apartments along a city sidewalk are treated as holy scripture by devotees, or fodder for checklists used by earnest planners and cynical developers alike.

“She was social activist, gadfly, rogue, and rebel,” writes Robert Kanigel in Eyes on the Street:

Kanigel sets out to chart the evolution of a physician’s daughter in Pennsylvania coal country into a Greenwich Village working woman and then a lay author of startling originality.

[...] the author strikes a conversational tone throughout that tries too hard to be engaging.

When Jacobs works for the Office of War Information in the 1940s, Kanigel gushes that “her talents, her bristling intelligence, were plain to see” but then frets that “she was still invisible to the great world of literature and ideas.”

Another path in — the heretical one that I recommend — is to skip the masterwork and instead read “Downtown Is for People,” one of 37 articles, speeches and ephemera in the new collection Vital Little Plans:

The piece appeared in 1958 in a surprising venue, Fortune magazine, and it maps out the terrain she would explore much more fully in “Death and Life.”

The “ultimate expert” on urban conditions can be you or me: “What is needed is an observant eye, curiosity about people, and a willingness to walk.”

There’s plenty more of value in “Vital Little Plans,” which ranges from a 1936 piece for Vogue on New York’s jewelry district to an excerpt from the book Jacobs was working on at the time of her death 60 years later at age 89.

In small doses it may be beneficial, says the woman who can be seen as having (figuratively) paved the way for the trend, but there’s a tipping point where “so many people want in on a place now generally perceived as interesting … that gentrification turns socially and economically vicious.”