부산대학교 도서관

(b Scranton, PA, May 4, 1916; d Toronto, April 25, 2006). American journalist, author and activist. In 1934, at the age of 18, she moved to New York City to pursue a writing career. A life-long lover and student of cities, she soon settled in Greenwich Village and was struck by the vibrancy of the city, even in the Great Depression. Jazz-Age Manhattan, with its new Chrysler and Empire State Buildings and the Rockefeller Center, would leave an indelible impression on her, becoming her exemplar of urban life and city planning. Self-educated except for a few years at Columbia University, Jacobs not only was fascinated by the physical, social and economic dynamics of city life, but read widely in science, particularly natural history; from her earliest writings on the city, in the 1930s and 1940s, she observed the built environment like a naturalist, seeing the evolution of city form and function through a collective design process. Following this belief, Jacobs passionately rejected both Beaux-Arts and modernist conceptions of city planning and civic design as architecture writ large, and all other authorial attempts to design the city like a ...