ABSTRACT
In the early 1960s Jane Jacobs’s blooming, buzzing, cheek-by-jowl vision of urban life found a receptive audience. Webber’s radical theory of urbanism or post-urbanism had a strong impact within academic planning circles. Literary performance artist and provocateur, media evangelist and Pop culture celebrity, McLuhan would continue to promote his global village in written and spoken pronouncements until his death in 1980. In rhetoric ranging from arch and esoteric wordplay to vatic utterances, from self-contradiction to sheer bafflement, he insisted that his postulations were experimental ‘probes’ into the electronic future. With the publication of Death and Life in 1961, Jacobs became a public figure and a celebrity, even receiving an invitation to speak at the White House.
