In memoriam: Professor Emeritus Allan B. Jacobs, influential urban planner and thinker about cities
Jacobs had an outsize impact on the field of urban design and led generations of students to grasp the importance of observation in understanding how great cities work.
The College of Environmental Design regretfully announces the death of Professor Emeritus Allan B. Jacobs, who passed away on February 18 at the age of 96. As a teacher, urban designer, author, and influential thinker, Jacobs championed first-hand observation of urban spaces as central to creating vibrant, livable cities. Rare for city planners, he moved among government, academia, and private practice, believing in a people-centered approach to the design of cities.
“Cities ought to be magnificent, beautiful places to live,” he wrote in the introduction to his 2011 book, The Good City. “They should be places where people can be fulfilled, where they can be what they can be, where there is freedom, love, ideas, excitement, quiet, and joy. Cities ought to be the ultimate manifestation of a society’s collective achievements. City planning, to me, is the art of helping cities to become and stay that way.”
Jacobs joined the faculty of the Department of City & Regional Planning in 1975, serving two terms as department chair; he retired in 2001. He established the department’s urban design concentration and helped found the college’s Master of Urban Design program. Before coming to Berkeley, he taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where he had earned his Master of City Planning degree, and served for eight years as the director of planning for the city of San Francisco. He also spent two formative years in Calcutta, advising on its urban design with the Ford Foundation.
— Allan B. Jacobs, The Good City
“Allan Jacobs has been a vital force in urban planning and city design. At Berkeley, he played a leading role in attracting students to the field of urban design and conveying the importance and the joy of looking closely at how cities become a part of our lives,” says Donlyn Lyndon, Eva Li Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Urban Design. “His innovative insights about what makes cities important and how to make significant contributions to their development have been of great importance to the field.”
“Allan Jacobs was a transformative figure whose advocacy for the unique character of places reshaped the practice of urban design,” says William W. Wurster Dean Renee Chow. “Alongside the work of other visionaries like Kevin Lynch and N. John Habraken, he taught me about the great power and necessity of direct observation. He was a giant force behind urban design both at our college and in the Bay Area. Jake’s wisdom will be timeless, reminding us that global challenges must be locally designed if we are to cultivate the unique wonder in each place.”
INFLUENTIAL PUBLICATIONS ADVOCATED FOR CLOSE ANALYSIS OF URBAN FORM
Jacobs developed and disseminated his ideas in several important books, including Making City Planning Work (1980), which chronicled his tenure as San Francisco’s planning director; Looking at Cities (1985), written during a fellowship residency at the American Academy in Rome; Great Streets (1993) and The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards (with Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofé, 2003), which both offer case studies that reveal the key elements of successful streets; and The Good City: Reflections and Imaginations (2011), a compendium of his career and thinking about cities.
“Toward an Urban Design Manifesto,” his 1982 article with fellow Berkeley professor Donald Appleyard (1928–1982), was also influential. Rejecting the approach of CIAM’s Charter of Athens, 50 years on, they advocated for an “urban fabric for an urban life,” where pedestrians could experience “diversity, spontaneity, and surprise.”
— Renee Chow, William W. Wurster Dean
In his best known book, Great Streets — still in print 30 years after it was first published — Jacobs analyzes the qualities of great streets around the world to glean the factors that can transform them into vibrant public spaces. The committee that awarded Jacobs the Kevin Lynch Award cited Great Streets for its “extraordinary influence on city design.”
Through text, freehand sketches, plans, and sections, the book reveals Jacobs’s persistent curiosity about how city streets work as social spaces. It also pioneered his “square-mile map” methodology, which has since become a standard way for urban designers and city planners to analyze the urban form and fabric of cities in a comparative way.
The book is filled with Jacobs’s close looking, his passionate joy of cities, and his love of life. “There is a magic to great streets,” he writes. “We are attracted to them not because we have to go there but because we want to be there. The best are as joyful as they are utilitarian. They are entertaining and they are open to all. They permit anonymity at the same time as individual recognition. They are symbols of a community and its history; they represent a public memory. They are places for escape and for romance, places to act and to dream.”
AN URBAN PLANNER WHO CREATED PLACES FOR PEOPLE
Jacobs began his career as an urban planner. He worked for the Pittsburgh Regional Planning Association for seven years, and then moved to India to advise on a metropolitan plan for Calcutta. He continued to practice urban design throughout his life, working on projects in Berkeley, Los Angeles, and San Francisco; Portland, Oregon; Vancouver, British Columbia; Curitiba, Brazil; and other cities. As a planner, he was concerned with creating places for communities, where people can enact their civic lives: “No great city has ever been known for its abundant supply of parking,” he said.
During his tenure as the director of the San Francisco Department of City Planning, from 1967 to 1975, Jacobs was responsible for developing major elements of the city’s comprehensive plan as well as design guidelines for downtown development. He also focused on revitalizing neighborhoods throughout San Francisco to make them more livable. Most notably, he oversaw preparation of an urban design plan for the city. In The Good City, Jacobs wrote that his goal for it was to create a plan that would address “the physical and sensory relationships between San Franciscans and their environment.”
The plan was innovative in its approach and presentation, popular among city residents, and widely heralded across the professional community. It identified key principles of the city’s urban form and patterns, based on a series of detailed studies, and illustrated these with hand-drawn images that make the ideas very accessible.
With partner Professor Emeritus Elizabeth Macdonald and their firm Jacobs Macdonald: Cityworks, he designed many significant streets, including Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco, Pacific Boulevard in Vancouver’s False Creek North neighborhood, and C. G. Road in Ahmedabad, India.
“His focus on the importance of street design changed the course of my career and that of many others in design fields,” says urban designer Frank Ducote (BArch 1966, MCP 1968), who worked with Jacobs and Macdonald on the Pacific Boulevard project.
MENTOR, ARTIST, AND “NATURAL-BORN FLÂNEUR”
Jacobs grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, of which he wrote, it was a “real city.” He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Miami University and studied at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He received his master’s degree in city planning from the University of Pennsylvania, studying with Lewis Mumford and Bill Wheaton. From 1954 to 1955, he was a Fulbright Scholar in City Planning at University College in London.
His numerous honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berkeley Citation, an American Academy in Rome Fellowship, the Kevin Lynch Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Athena Medal from the Congress for the New Urbanism, and a Distinguished Leadership Award from the American Planning Association.
Jacobs was a true Renaissance man, who lived life to the full and in his own way. Ducote sums up what many people recall about Jacobs: “Jake was a mentor, a role model, an artist and writer of great talent, a gifted storyteller, a true lover of life, and a natural-born flâneur.”