Three books, all written by women in the early 1960s, changed the way we looked at the world and ourselves: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and Jane
Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. All three books created revolutions in their respective spheres of influence, and nothing affected city planning and architecture ��or the
way we think about how life is lived in densely packed urban centers ��more than Jane Jacobs's far-sighted polemic. This was an era when the "urban renewal" movement was at its most aggressive,
and Jacobs correctly perceived that the new structures that were being built to replace the aging housing of our older cities were often far worse, in both their impact on society and their
architectural sterility, than what urban planners identified as "the problem." She was ridiculed and pilloried by the establishment, but her ideas quickly took hold, and no one ever looked at
what made for livable and viable neighborhoods the same way again.
