Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary
A Lecture with Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Part Three of Village Preservation celebration of Women’s History Month.

Jane Jacobs is most often portrayed as the woman who, through her brilliant grass-roots organizing during the 1950s and 60s, single-handedly saved her beloved Greenwich Village from being bulldozed by Robert Moses. But this characterization is a vast oversimplification.

In this lecture, Alice Sparberg Alexiou, author of the first biography of Jacobs, will discuss Jacobs’ complex legacy. Alexiou will focus on Jacobs’ ideas, and, most importantly, how brilliantly she conveyed them in writing, most notably in her most famous work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Her ideas eventually entered our collective consciousness, forever influencing the way we look at cities, neighborhoods, and individual buildings.