Vital Little Plans ─ The Short Works of Jane Jacobs

A career-spanning selection of previously uncollected essays, articles, speeches, and interviews by the legendary writer, urbanist, and unconventional economic thinker Jane Jacobs—whose 1961 classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities started a national conversation that remains relevant more than half a century later.

Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) was a writer who for more than forty years championed innovative, community-based approaches to urban planning. Her 1961 treatise The Death and Life of Great American Cities became perhaps the most influential text about the inner workings and failings of cities, inspiring generations of planners and activists.
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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. He has written articles and reviews on urbanism and culture for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Nation. He is currently associate professor of American studies and urban studies at Brown University.
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Nathan Storring is a curator, writer, and designer who specializes in making contemporary architecture and city planning accessible to the general public. He has served as acting curator of Urbanspace Gallery in Toronto (founded by colleagues of Jane Jacobs) and currently works at Project for Public Spaces, an urban advocacy organization founded to put the ideas of progressive urbanists like Jane Jacobs into practice.