International conference ‘Jane Jacobs 100’, Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, 24–25 May 2016

Abstract

Jane Jacobs has been a highly influential thinker in urban design and town planning debates for the past half-century. She authored publications that became classics in urban studies literature, such as The Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961) and Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), and left behind a number of pioneering studies on urban economics and the primacy of cities in states.In May 2016, Jane Jacobs would have had her 100th birthday. To celebrate this occasion, TU Delft and Erasmus University College Rotterdam in the Netherlands took on the challenge of organising a conference wholly dedicated to critically discussing Jane Jacobs's legacy and relevance for the twenty-first century. The organisers emphasised that this was the only academic conference in the world dedicated to Jane Jacobs. The conference attracted about 150 participants and was held in the marvellous buildings of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment at TU Delft. Nearly 40 presentations were divided among six parallel tracks:* Ethics and the just city;* Street spaces: history, heritage and memory;* The dynamics of neighbourhoods;* The reshaping of old urban fabrics in Chinese cities;* Organised complexity; and* Safety in the public space.Aside from this broad range of topics around the ideas of Jacobs, keynote speeches, workshops and special events, such as a 'Jane's walk' through Rotterdam, completed the programme.Keynotes: 'becoming' and reinventing Jane JacobsThe conference opened with three consecutive keynote lectures - the most notable of which, for depth and accuracy, was Peter Laurence's opening speech. Laurence's opening presentation of his book Becoming Jane Jacobs constituted the perfect introduction to a programme whose value, in a genuine Jacobsian spirit, consisted of the quality and depth of exchanges among participants who - regardless of their world views and affiliation - recognise in the American thinker an inexhaustible source of inspiration. Laurence's opening speech was rich with anecdotes, analyses and interpretations of Jacobs's life and thoughts, from her early writings as 'city journalist' up to her most comprehensive contributions as a scholar. Through his contribution, Laurence set the perfect ground for a conference that remained faithful to what Jacobs embodied in both her intellectual production and her urban activism: that it is not the sum, but rather the integration, of people's ideas, along their lifelong development, that constitutes the basis for cohesive and creative transformations of both the city and how we think about it.Professor Dirk Schubert (HafenCity University Hamburg) made a plea for contextualising Jacobs's ideas in contemporary urban planning, and critically re-evaluating such ideas. This provided a framework for critically discussing the conference theme - the legacy and relevance of Jane Jacobs in the twenty-first century - instead of being just a celebration. It was the explicit aim of the conference not only to 'celebrate' the figure of Jane Jacobs as urban activist, but to explore and critically question the value of her intellectual contributions for both contemporary and future urban planning.Arnold Reijndorp, professor of urban sociology at the University of Amsterdam, was the third keynote speaker. He explored how critical reflections on the ideas of Jacobs should take place, by referring to examples from the Netherlands. These three keynote speakers complemented each other and set the scene for the other discussions throughout the conference.Academic, activist or a symbol of women's emancipation?On a not-too-marginal note, the three opening keynote lectures dedicated to Jacobs's legacy also caused a reaction by Delft University's students. In the main conference room, two rows of chairs sat empty and displayed the names of female scholars who had not been considered as possible keynote speakers. …