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This is a translation of an interview with Jane Jacobs carried out by Claire Parin* on May 28th, 1999 in Toronto. Claire Parin is an architect and urbanist and teaches at the l'école nationale supérieure d'architecture et de paysage de Bordeaux in France.
CP: What is your intellectual itinerary? Where do you come from?
JJ: I come from one thing leading to another...I got interested, as you know, from my book Death and Life of Great American Cities in how cities work socially; and, socially and politically, and that interested me in how do they work economically and how do they change economically, what happens, and so that was what my next book was about.
That led me on to how do cities change other places, because it became evident to me that cities are really the motors of economic life and they are the source of changes in the world; so how does this happen? So, that was the subject of my third book.
Then I got interested in what's the morality that keeps these kinds of things going, which I explored in Systems of Survival , and that made me interested in what is our place in the grand scheme of things, in nature, and how do our economies fit in with nature? And of course, I would always be getting interested in those things while I was writing the previous book. My publisher told me: 'you have been writing the same book all your life!' That's true, I didn't know I was, but...So it's just one thing leading to another.
CP: Looking back to the sixties, there were a lot of thoughts about cities in different disciplines: sociological and anthropological approaches in the Chicago School's wake, and fields such as behavioural design and ecology. Did you feel an affiliation with some of these ideas when you wrote your first book?
JJ: One approach with which I was the most in touch, actually, was that of the English Architecture Review people. I didn't really feel much in touch, actually, with American sociologists. They were not really interested in cities; they were interested in other things, mainly in statistical behaviour of human beings, without really differentiating, it seems to me, in any sensible...