But to a remarkable extent, she set the agenda in 1961, and it remains about where she set it. It's only a slight exaggeration to say that contemporary urban thought is a series of footnotes to Jane Jacobs. When she wrote Death and Life , downtown renewal in American cities consisted largely of the destruction of two-story commercial structures, their replacement by large office towers, and the creation of huge windswept plazas in which no one congregated. Now, at the very least, most of us realize that empty plazas are no urban adornment. Busy streets are safe streets.
Empty streets are dangerous.
That's no more than simple common sense now. But it was heretical 40 years ago. Death and Life was prescient in so many ways that one short column couldn't possibly acknowledge them all. Jacobs argued for the reclaiming of seedy industrial waterfronts for recreational purposes. Today that is accepted wisdom not only among New Urbanists but in the planning department of virtually every big American city.