VITAL LITTLE PLANS

VITAL LITTLE PLANS is a selection of previously uncollected essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs, the legendary writer, urbanist, and unconventional economic thinker.

Jane Jacobs has long been a touchstone for city dwellers, lovers of the literature of cities, and general readers who appreciate her iconoclastic intellect and her plainspoken approach to human problems large and small. Over half the world's population now lives in cities, and urban issues--gentrification, race, inequality, policing, climate change--are once again at the forefront of public debates. An indispensable companion to all of Jane's major works on urbanism, economics, politics, and ethics, the volume will offer readers a chance to see Jane's entire career as a writer, thinker, and activist for the first time. From bike sharing to pop-up public art to every artisanal business that sets up shop in a reclaimed industrial building, the influence of Jane's ideas are all around us. This book shows that while Jane lived and worked in the 20th century her ideas and visions are indispensable to living in the 21st.

The collection is drawn from varied sources, among them Vogue, Architectural Forum, Harper's Bazaar, The Village Voice, Fortune, and speeches given at the White House and on the occasion of the first ever Earth Day.

Co-editors Samuel Zipp a Brown University professor, and curator-designer Nathan Storring have spent years hunting down the very best of Jane's shorter writings, and have contributed an introduction and annotations throughout that draw connections between each article and her major works, while offering historical and biographical context.
This publication will coincide with the centenary of Jane Jacobs’s birth, as well as the first major biography of Jane, Eyes on the Street by Robert Kanigel (Knopf).

Jane Jacobs was an urban writer and activist who championed new, community-based approaches to planning for more than 40 years. She passed away in 2006.
Her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, became perhaps the most influential American text about the the workings of cities, inspiring generations of urban planners and activists. The Random House edition has never been out of print since its publication and has sold well over half a million copies internationally. Random House also published The Economy of Cities (1969), The Question of Separatism (1980), Cities and the Wealth of Nations (1984), Systems of Survival (1992), The Nature of Economies (2000), and Dark Age Ahead (2004).

Samuel Zipp is a writer and historian. He is the author of the award-winning Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York which tells the larger history of the battles around urban renewal that propelled Jane Jacobs to national fame, and has written on urbanism and culture for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Nation. He is currently a professor at Brown University.

Nathan Storring is a curator, writer, and designer who specializes in making contemporary architecture and city planning accessible to the general public. He currently works at Project for Public Spaces, an urban advocacy organization founded to put the ideas of progressive urbanists like Jane Jacobs into practice.