ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book offers in some ways the highest level of respect for Jane Jacobs. It aims to take her seriously, as a profoundly important figure, and not a stick figure. The book provides people who would look at the range of her thinking and evaluate her greatest contributions but also wrestle with her blind spots, her contradictory political impulses. It also looks at the unintended uses to which her writing has been put. The book is less about Jane Jacobs as an individual than about "Jane Jacobs" as the shorthand for a set of ideas and planning practices that have spread around the world over the past half century, some of which the individual named Jane Jacobs might not have recognized as her own.
