Modern Era
Jane Jacobs
1916–2006 · Cities & spontaneous order
The city's order comes from its people, not its planners.
In their words
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
The Death and Life of Great American Cities demolished the mid-century planning consensus by showing that busy, mixed streets police themselves and that grand redevelopment destroys the networks it claims to replace. Jacobs argued that healthy cities are bottom-up orders that no planner can design, and she applied the same suspicion of central prescription to economies in The Economy of Cities.
Why it matters for freedom
She showed that order grows from unplanned cooperation, and that the people who live somewhere know it better than the people who map it.
Who they stood against
the planners who wanted to demolish working neighborhoods for highways