The Ottawa Citizen

She was an autodidact who never graduated from university, and her contrarian ideas about cities once prompted the eminent historian Lewis Mumford to grumpily dismiss her as a "sloppy novice." But by the time of her death yesterday in Toronto, a week shy of her 90th birthday, Jane Jacobs had been widely acknowledged as the most prescient and original urban thinker of her time. Her ideas have reshaped the way countless people think about cities. Though she is credited with helping to spark the New Urbanism movement, which has hugely influenced planners and architects, she was always something of a prophet without honour among city decision makers, who still recoil from many of her urban prescriptions. "If you ask what's her legacy, in terms of cities, she's not had nearly enough influence," says John Sewell, a friend and former mayor of Toronto, who describes Ms. Jacobs as "the premier thinker about cities of the 20th century. She stands above the Lewis Mumfords of the world, because she was so practical."