Jane Jacobs, third from right, with architect Philip Johnson, protests against the demolition of Penn Station in New York, 1963.

“The need for Jane Jacobs and her clear-eyed human-scale urbanism is as strong as ever. Her masterpiece The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) described in brilliant detail the intricate ecology of how a city works (New York) or does not work (Detroit). Though Jacobs never wrote fiction, the book was more like a novelistic rendering of lived street life than a scholarly text. She was, as she once described herself, a ‘student of cities’, more interested in the effects of buildings than their design. Vital Little Plans collects for the first time Jacobs’s interviews, speeches, talks and short pieces of journalism – and there is much in this lucid and persuasive anthology that resonates today. In her essay ‘Downtown Is for People’, from 1958, she criticises…