Peter L. Laurence
Philadelphia: Penn Press, 2016
Becoming Jane Jacobs (Penn Press, 2016) is an intellectual biography of Jane Jacobs that provided a new foundation for understanding Jacobs’s life and ideas about cities and urban design. The book explains Jacobs’s development as a writer, architectural critic, and urban theorist, tracing the experiences and influences that led to her canonical book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961. The book further documents Jacobs’s contributions to the development of American architectural criticism and the discipline of urban design, while situating her work in these realms as precedents for her later books on urban economies, ethics, and civilizations.