Jane Jacobs, 89; Urban Theorist, Community Activist Who Fought Lower Manhattan Freeway Plan

Jane Jacobs, an urban theorist and community activist whose books argued for the rehabilitation of neighborhoods on traditional lines, breaking with emerging trends in city development, died Tuesday. She was 89.

An American-born citizen of Canada, Jacobs died at a hospital in Toronto of natural causes, according to publicist Sally Marvin of Random House, Jacobs' publisher. Jacobs was admitted to the hospital late last week and had been in failing health for several years.

She was internationally known as an advocate of cities with distinct neighborhoods, built to a human scale, mixing commercial and residential space.

She was against building highways that cut through city centers and was once arrested at a public hearing after she stormed the podium to express her opposition to a plan for an expressway through lower Manhattan.

"Jane Jacobs' thinking about cities was clear and it came from a person who lived in cities," Toronto Mayor David Miller told The Times on Tuesday. "She didn't just write about urban issues. She acted on her convictions."

Jacobs' most influential work, 1961's "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," set the stage for a battle that Jacobs waged for decades. Defying popular theories on how to renew city slums by plowing them under and replacing them with uniform housing projects, she pushed for recycled buildings and new structures scaled to the existing neighborhood.

Her feisty prose often read like a manifesto. "This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding," she announced in the opening paragraph of "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

She continued: "It is also, and mostly, an attempt to introduce new principles of city planning and rebuilding, different and even opposite from those now taught in everything from schools of architecture and planning to Sunday supplements and women's magazines."

In her view a successful city needed vibrant neighborhoods linked by public transportation. Each area needed its own mix of old and new buildings, a constant influx of smaller, independent businesses, and a range of residential and commercial space.

Early critics accused her of being short on realistic solutions to the challenges of urban life. Admirers called her a maverick and a comprehensive thinker. Thirty years later, when her books were required reading in graduate school programs and many of her beliefs about cities were widely accepted, she was praised as a visionary and a pivotal figure in her field.