Jane Jacobs

The activist met Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr., a Columbia-educated architect while working with the State department and married in 1944. Together they had two sons, James and Ned, and a daughter, Burgin.

Following her death the Rockefeller Foundation announced the creation of the Jane Jacobs Medal in 2007, while The Canadian Urban Institute also offers an award in her name - the Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement Award.

Jane Butzner was born on May 4, 1916 in Scranton, Pennsylvania, to John Decker Butzner, a doctor, and Bess Robison Butzner, a former teacher and nurse. She had two brothers including John Decker Butzner, Jr .and a sister.

She graduated from Scranton High School where she was an indifferent student who preferred to read a book of her own, concealed under her desk, rather than listen to her teacher.

She worked for a year as an unpaid assistant at the Scranton Tribune after high school. In 1935, she moved to New York City and worked as a stenographer and a freelance writer.

She studied at Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics and was pleased with the marks she got.

Her first job after graduation was with a magazine called Iron Age. Experiencing discrimination at Iron Age, she advocated for equal pay for women and for workers' right to unionize.

She became a feature writer for the Office of War Information during WWII, and then a reporter for Amerika, a publication of the U.S. State Department and continued to write for Amerika post- war.

She was asked to fill a questionnaire while working for the State Department. She was an anti –communist but was pro-union. She had come under suspicion for appreciating Saul Alinsky, the American community organizer.

Jacobs’ ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’, a very influential book on city-planning, introduced terms like "social capital" and mixed primary uses". She labeled the entire profession of city planning, a pseudoscience.

She fought to prevent Washington Square Park from becoming a highway and chaired the Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan. In1968, following a public hearing; she was arrested on charges of inciting a riot.