JANE JACOBS 1916-2006

摘要

"A city is a place where you can buy a second-hand violin and keep a mistress." So wrote Jane Jacobs in the late 1990s apropos of the redevelopment and gentrification of Manhattan's Times Square, a transformation she heartily disapproved. I've always found the violin and mistress a wonderfully compact way to define the multifarious pleasures of urban life, even if the mistress part is a bit surprising coming from a woman of Jacobs's liberal persuasions. In 2004, on one of her increasingly rare trips from her home in Toronto back to New York City, I had the chance to ask her about it. She told me that the author of the statement was actually the architect Oscar Stonorov, who said it of Philadelphia.