Jane Jacobs was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve, and fail. The impact of Jane Jacobs's observation, activism, and writing is felt worldwide and, as a co-founder of The Center For The Living City, within all our programming.