ABSTRACT
In 1963, in my senior year of high school, I had to write a book report for an English class. I found Jane Jacobs The Death and Life in Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961) in my father’s bookcase, and despite its hefty size, I completed the assignment and got good marks for the effort. I was living at that time in New Concord, a small college town in southeastern Ohio (population 2000) where my father was teaching violin and conducting the orchestra at a small liberal arts college, at the foothills of Appalachia, so the story she told was not an everyday reality to me. I had visited New York City once a few years before, and had visited Columbus, Ohio, a mid-size midwestern city a few times. But that was the extent of my urban experience during my first 18 years. Yet something in what Jacobs saw and wrote stuck with me.
