There will be a public celebration for Jane Jacobs this evening, 5:00 pm, under the arch in Washington Square Park.

Lisa Chamerblain will be there and has a nice write-up on her blog, Polis:

It has become the contrarian fashion to say that Jane Jacobs’ contribution to urban planning didn’t address many of the problems we grapple with today, and that Robert Moses wasn’t entirely destructive and wrong. I find this to be an intellectually lazy argument. No single person could simultaneously explode an entire profession AND anticipate every possible consequence of that (such as gentrification, which did not exist at the time that she wrote her seminal book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961).