How had Higgins fallen so low? Mountain isolation contributed, but it was not the only factor. The same fate, after all, had befallen much larger cities, and even empires—Rome, the Olmecs, the New Kingdom of Egypt, and perhaps other civilizations, like the people who painted the Lascaux caves, for which we don’t even have names. “Suppose, hypothetically, that the world were to behave like a single sluggish empire in decline,” wrote Jacobs.

Such a thing could happen if cities in too many places stagnated simultaneously or in quick succession. Or it could happen if the world were to become, in fact, one single sluggish empire … We all have our nightmares about the future of economic life; that one is mine.

In the centenary of her birth, Jacobs has been remembered as our Solon of cities: a shrewd theorist who revealed how cities work, why they thrive, and why they fail. Jacobs lived to the age of 89, long enough to see her renegade theories become conventional wisdom. No one questions anymore that lively neighborhoods require diversity of use and function, that more roads lead to more cars, that historic buildings should be preserved, that investment in public transportation reduces traffic and promotes neighborhood activity, that “flexible and gradual change” is almost always preferable to “cataclysmic,” broad-stroke redevelopment.

Urban life was Jacobs’s great subject. But her great theme was the fragility of democracy—how difficult it is to maintain, how easily it can crumble. A city offered the perfect laboratory in which to study democracy’s intricate, interconnected gears and ballistics. “When we deal with cities,” she wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), “we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense.” When cities succeed, they represent the purest manifestation of democratic ideals: “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” When cities fail, they fail for the same reasons democracies fail: corruption, tyranny, homogenization, overspecialization, cultural drift and atrophy.

In a year when American democracy has courted despotism, Jacobs’s work offers a warning and a challenge. Her goal was never merely to enlighten urban planners. In her work she argued, with increasing urgency, that the distance between New York City and Higgins is not as great as it seems. It is not very great at all, and it is shrinking.

Four new books are united in their determination to undermine the seductive myth that Jacobs, as her biographer Peter L. Laurence puts it, “was primarily a housewife with unusual abilities to observe and defend the domestic surroundings of her Greenwich Village home.” This line was codified in 1962 by The New Yorker’s architecture critic Lewis Mumford in a 30-page review of Death and Life that called the book “a mingling of sense and sentimentality, of mature judgments and schoolgirl howlers.” (If Mumford was responsible for the article’s headline, “Mother Jacobs’ Home Remedies,” he seems to have regretted it. In his 1968 collection, The Urban Prospect, it appears under the moderately less chauvinistic “Home Remedies for Urban Cancer.”) The allegation of amateurism often went unchallenged because most of Jacobs’s considerable body of writing before The Death and Life of Great American Cities had been published without a byline.

University of Pennsylvania Press

Two new biographies—Laurence’s Becoming Jane Jacobs, a close, vivid study of Jacobs’s intellectual development, and Robert Kanigel’s broader Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs—as well as an anthology of previously uncollected articles and speeches, Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs, and Jane Jacobs: The Last Interview and Other Conversations correct the record. By the time she published her masterpiece, at the age of 45, she had been writing about urban redevelopment for nearly a decade in dozens of lengthy articles for Architectural Forum. Before that she had written about, and in direct service of, American democracy.