In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs turned the planning orthodoxy of her day inside out. Where postwar urban renewal cleared dense, mixed-use districts in favour of zoned towers and expressways, she argued that short blocks, aged buildings, mixed primary uses and busy sidewalks were what kept a neighbourhood safe and economically alive. Her concept of “eyes on the street”, ordinary people watching over public space simply by using it, became one of the most cited ideas in postwar urbanism. She tested the argument in practice: in 1958 she helped block Robert Moses’ plan to drive a road through Washington Square Park, and a decade later she was arrested at a public hearing while campaigning against his Lower Manhattan Expressway, which would have demolished large parts of SoHo and Little Italy.

Jacobs wrote from a specific place: a low-rise, already-gentrifying Greenwich Village in the 1950s and 1960s. Critics have argued that the very qualities she championed, walkability, historic fabric, fine-grained retail, have since become a planning template that raises land values and displaces the working-class residents her own neighbourhood once housed, a dynamic sometimes summarised as “Jacobs’ paradox”. Others note that her account of self-policing streets paid little attention to race, policing and structural inequality in American cities, and that a model built around one wealthy Manhattan district transfers awkwardly to post-industrial, car-dependent or rapidly urbanising regions with different histories of land and infrastructure.

Sixty-five years on, debates about the “15-minute city”, car-dependency and the climate cost of low-density sprawl all return to questions Jacobs asked first: who is a street for, and what density and mix let a neighbourhood support itself without a masterplan dictating its uses. Her insistence that residents could read their own streets better than distant experts also anticipated today’s arguments for participatory planning and against top-down infrastructure imposed without consent, concerns close to the work the Centre for the Just City pursues across its own research and teaching.