Sunday, August 1, 2004

Jane Jacobs has published Dark Age Ahead (Random House, 2004), in which she targets “five crucial weaknesses in the foundation of contemporary life in the West” — one of which is “dumbed down taxes.”

Author, activitist, social theorist and renowned urban planner, Jane Jacobs defined an increasingly influential way of looking at cities by opposing “slum” clearance and “suburban sprawl,” and advocating the “restoration” of urban centers. Still in print 40-plus years after publication, her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) revolutionized urban planning.

Jacob’s later works explored her fundament ideas for different perspectives: urban economics in The Economy of Cities (1969) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and political philosophy in Systems of Survival (1992). More recently Ms. Jacobs argued that economic life obeys the same rules as those governing the systems in nature in The Nature of Economies (2000).

About her latest work, Publisher’s Weekly wrote “Witty, beautifully written–the culmination of Jacobs’ previous thinking, and a step forward that deftly invokes a broader philosophical, even metaphysical, context.”