Jacobs, Jane (1916– )

US urban theorist and author. As associate editor of Architectural Forum 1952–68, she gained a reputation for attacking urban planners for destroying older neighbourhoods with roads and housing projects; her most influential work was The Death and Life of Great American Cities 1961. She served on the New York Community Planning Board and was active in trying to save communities such as Greenwich Village. She was briefly a consultant to the urban-legal programme of the University of New York Law School, but she concentrated on her own writings such as Cities and the Wealth of Nations 1989 and Systems of Survival 1992.

She was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and was married to the architect Robert Hyde Jacobs Jr.