ABSTRACT
This entry provides an overview of the work of the urban planner, community activist, and economic theorist Jane Jacobs. It provides biographical highlights as it pertains to her role as an activist, which was influenced by her intellectual endeavors, provided much to her fame, and is essential to understanding her place in history. It provides a summary of the effects that her ideas have had upon the fields of urban planning and economics. The highlights of her life story and activist efforts are provided and organized chronologically. Combined with the publicity surrounding her activism, most notably to stop the building of the Lower Manhattan Expressway, her efforts came at the right time to lead a paradigm shift in the field. However, once her ideas were incorporated into the field, they were often taken for granted and not properly attributed to her, and also her economic theorizing was much less influential than her writing on cities and urbanism.
