ABSTRACT
“Life attracts life”—an assertion from page 348 of Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities; in the context, as it happens, of the inadvisability of separating pedestrian traffic from the rest of the street’s overlapping functions. But just as easily serving as an epigram, not only to the seminal book but also to strategies of thinking, and making, that provided its foundation. By 1958, it had long been the practice of Jacobs’s independent, inquisitive mind to acquire facts and observations far in advance of any assumed usefulness, as an inventor hoards steel and spring, or a child shiny stones. In the text of Death and Life, such seemingly extraneous ideas and metaphors are threaded together with detailed empirical observations on urban life. The combination of the two served, more often than not, to arrange the fabric of urban observation onto the living body of the ideas from biology and the natural sciences.
