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Toronto always gives me the strange sensation of being in a parallel universe, one in which I might be in a great American city--say, Detroit, St. Louis, or Cleveland--if only we had not gone through the cultural convulsions of the postwar era and tossed our cities into the dumpster of history. Hollywood constantly uses Toronto as a set for Anycity, USA, but the truth is that it is in much better shape than almost any American city.

In Toronto you see office buildings every bit as hideous and grandiose as in America--and the same overly broad streets, poorly furnished with medians, trees, and other urban decor considered impediments to express motoring. But despite these shortcomings, Toronto is alive. Its downtown streets are teeming with people who actu-ally live in the city center in apartment buildings and houses, and the sidewalks are jammed until late at night. The public realm, where the buildings meet the sidewalk, is active. Toronto is what many American cities wish they could be.

Jane Jacobs--the renowned urbanist and author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations, The Economy of Cities, Systems of Survival, and other books--lives here. Her house is in the Annex neighborhood on a serene residential street off Bloor, the main drag of the University of Toronto, which in that vicinity resembles the Eighth Street shopping district of Greenwich Village--where Jacobs so famously lived and wrote years ago. There are boutiques and bistros alongside copy shops, Asian groceries, and shoe-repair joints. Jacobs's home is a Toronto "double," a type of semi-detached brick row house, with a generous neoclassical white wooden porch, a Dutch-style gable end, and ivy growing up the wall.

Jacobs lives here alone now; her architect husband, Robert, passed away in 1996. One son and his family live right down the block, and see her often. The 84-year-old author was a little incapacitated from hip surgery when I stopped by last year. The inside of her house was pure sixties Bohemian Intellectual. The Jacobses had removed some interior walls, so the first-floor kitchen, dining room, and living room all flowed together. There was a great groaning wall of books, of course, and other surfaces were still painted the bright colors of the go-go era, when the family moved there. A breastplate made from beach bones, shells, and pieces of driftwood was displayed near the bay window in front; the tablecloth in the dining room was a bold East Indian print. There were drawings by Ja-cobs's daughter, who lives in the backwoods of British Columbia, and lots of family photographs everywhere. Her office is a spare bedroom upstairs in the rear, where it is especially quiet.

Jacobs still looks like that fa-mous photo of her taken in the White Horse tavern in the West Village more than three decades ago (a cigarette in one hand and a beer mug in the other). Her hair is the same silvery helmet with bangs, and her big eyeglasses emphasize her role as the ever penetrating observer, with an impish overlay. She still likes to drink beer, and worked on a bottle of some dark local brew while we talked.

The daughter of a doctor and a nurse, Jacobs grew up in Scranton, Pennsylvania. She worked briefly as a reporter for the Scranton Tribune and then went to New York City in 1934, where she plugged away as a freelance writer. She landed a staff job with Architectural Forum in 1952. The job gave her a privileged perch for observing the fiasco of postwar urban renewal and all its evil consequences. A decade later she seized the imagination of an otherwise extremely complacent era when she declared so starkly in The Death and Life of Great American Cities that the experiment of Modernist urbanism was a thumping failure. Jacobs urged Americans to look to the traditional wisdom of the vernacular city and its fundamental unit--the street--rather than the planning gurus. This was the first shot in a war that has been ongoing ever since. Decades later her book become one of the seminal texts of the New Ur-banism (along with the work of Lewis Mumford, who was at first a supporter of hers and then an adversary after publication of her landmark book).

Jacobs suffered the opprobrium of the architectural and plan-ning establishment for decades. They never recovered from her frontal assault--especially the sinister Robert Moses, who fell from power not long after he tangled with Jacobs on his proposal to run a freeway through Washington Square. One can say pretty definitively that she won the battle and the war, though the enormous inertia of American culture continues to act as a drag on a genuine civic revival there.

By the mid-1960s Jacobs's interests and writings broadened to take in the wider issues of eco-nomics and social relations, and by force of intellect she com-pelled the cultural elite to take seriously an untrained female generalist--and wonderful prose stylist--who had the nerve to work out large ideas on her own. Naturally her books are now part of the curriculum. During the course of our conversation we were seated at her dining room table:

September 6, 2000 Toronto, Canada

JHK: In The Death and Life of Great American Cities you wrote: "It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give." What was your state of mind back then? Were you ticked off at American culture? What was it that was getting under your skin in those days?

JJ: What was getting immediately under my skin was this mad spree of deceptions and vandalism and waste that was called urban renewal. And the way it had been adopted like a fad. People were so mindless about it--and so dishonest about what was being done. That's what ticked me off; because I was working for an architectural magazine, and I saw all this first-hand--how the most awful things were being excused.

JHK: You must have already been acquainted with things like Le Corbusier's "Radiant City" and some of the schemes from the 1920s and the Bauhaus?

JJ: Yes, but I didn't have any feelings about these things one way or another. I didn't have any abstractions about American culture. I had no ideology. But I'll tell you something else that had been worrying me. I liked visiting museums that showed old-time machines and tools. I was struck with the way these old machines were painted. They were done in a way that showed you how they worked. The makers cared about how these things were put together. I used to go to the railroad station in Scranton and watch the locomotives. I got a big bang out of seeing how those pistons moved the wheels, and then the connection of that with the steam inside. In the meantime, along came these locomotives that had skirts on them. Suddenly you couldn't see how the wheels moved, and that disturbed me. It was supposed to be for some aerodynamic reason, but that didn't make sense. And I began to notice how everything was being covered up, and I thought that was kind of sick.

JHK: So the whole streamlining thing bugged you?

JJ: That's right. So I remember very well what was in my mind when I wrote, "We have become so feckless." It was those skirts on the locomotives I was thinking about and how this had extended to "we didn't care how our cities worked anymore." We didn't care to show where the en-trances were in buildings--that's all I meant. It was not some enormous comment on Ameri-can society. I just thought this was a real decadence.

JHK: How were the proponents of urban renewal dishonest?

JJ: Well, I talked to an architect in 1958 who helped justify the destruction of the West End of Boston. And he told me that he had had to go on his hands and knees with a photographer through utility crawl spaces so they could get pictures of sufficiently dark and noisome spaces to justify that it was a slum. Now that is real dishonesty.

JHK: But isn't that the whole tale of the mid-twentieth cen-tury? That scores of architects and planning officials went along with something that was really pernicious?

JJ: That's right. And how did they justify it? Urban renewal was a greater good, so they would bear false witness for this greater good. Why was this a greater good? Because slums were bad. And I'd say, "But this isn't a slum!" They didn't care how things worked anymore. That was part of what was making me so angry. They also didn't seem to care what part truth and untruths had in these things. And that's part of how things work too.

JHK: Did you ever meet the infamous Robert Moses?

JJ: No, I saw him only once, at a hearing about the proposed road through Washington Square, which was to lead to an entrance ramp to the lower Manhattan expressway. He was there briefly to speak his piece. But nobody was told that at the time. None of us had spoken yet, because they always had the officials speak first and then they would go away and they wouldn't listen to the people. Anyway, he stood up there gripping the railing, and he was furious at the effrontery of this. I guess he could already see that his plan was in danger, because he was saying, "There is nobody against this--NOBODY, NOBODY, NOBODY--but a bunch of, a bunch of mothers!" And then he stomped out.

JHK: Did he do more damage to New York than Albert Speer did to Berlin?

JJ: Well, I haven't been to Berlin. And I don't think we have to compare them. He did an awful lot of damage. Yes, he did. And I think New York is just now healing itself.

JHK: Why did you move to Canada in the late 1960s?

JJ: We came in protest of the Vietnam War. We had two draft-age sons. Both preferred going to jail to going to war. And my husband said, "You know, we didn't raise these boys to go to jail." In any case we didn't like the war. We sympathized with their antagonism to it, so we de-cided to come to another country. We were just not cut out to be citizens of an empire.

JHK: It must have been very disruptive.

JJ: It would have been disruptive if we had thought of ourselves as exiles. People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together. We thought of ourselves as immigrants. It was an adventure, and we were all in it together.

JHK: But you were leaving quite a lot behind.

JJ: Yes, but we discovered an-other thing when we got here. Americans don't think that other places are as real as America. We were leaving things behind. Well, we were coming to other things that were just as real, just as interesting, just as exciting. And people would ask me after we'd decided to stay, "When are you coming back?" "We're not." "Oh, but you can't just--you've got to come back to real life." And I would say, "It's just as real." This is very hard for Am-ericans to understand. I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. This self-centeredness is a very strange thing. I came here for positive reasons; we stayed for positive reasons--we liked it. Why did I become a Canadian citizen? Not because I was rejecting being a U.S. citizen. When I became a Canadian citizen, you couldn't be a dual citizen--now you can --so I had to be one or the other. But the reason I became a Canadian citizen was because it seemed abnormal to me not to be able to vote.

JHK: How many years did it take you to compose your classic, The Death and Life of Great American Cities?

JJ: Not very long. I started it in the fall of '58 and I finished it in January of '61. But I had been thinking about it for a long time. And although I didn't know what I was gathering information for, I was gathering information for it.

JHK: Ed Logue, who passed away earlier this year, was kind of an emblematic figure of his time. He was a product of Yale and went on to inadvertently destroy both New Haven and much of central Boston by directing urban-renewal campaigns in the 1960s. Did you watch these schemes unfold? What did you think of them?

JJ: I thought they were awful. I thought he was a very destructive man--and I came to that opinion the first time I met him, which was in New Haven. He was telling me all the wonderful things he was doing. I had started working on my book, and I went to see him to find out what was happening. He did tell me some useful things. In particular he told me something very revealing: he said the best thing that could happen to San Francisco would be another earthquake and fire, like the one in 1904. And I was appalled at this. I had been to San Francisco and thought it was a wonderful place. He was serious about it--he thought it should all be wiped out and built new. Boy, in my books, he went down as a maniac.

JHK: What are your thoughts on what has happened to American cities?

JJ: It's a tragedy--a totally unnecessary tragedy.

JHK: The destruction continues.

JJ: Yes, because nothing has really changed. Talk has changed, but regulations haven't; lending systems for these things haven't changed. The notion--and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism--the notion of the shopping center as a valid kind of downtown has taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by different people with different ideas.

JHK: But that's one of the other directions the New Urbanists are going in. I think we're leaving the age of the megaproject.

JJ: Here's what I think is happening. I look at what happened at the end of Victorianism. Modernism really started with people getting infatuated with the idea of "It's the twentieth century--is this suitable for the future?" This started happening before the First World War, and it wasn't just the soldiers. You can see it happening if you read the Bloomsbury biographies. It was a reaction to a great extent against Victorian-ism; there was so much that was repressive and stuffy. Victorian buildings were associated with it, and they were regarded as very ugly. Even when they weren't ugly, people made them ugly. They were painted hideously.

JHK: You were particularly harsh on Ebenezer Howard and Patrick Geddes and the Garden City movement of the early twentieth century. It was in some ways another one of those really bad ideas that a lot of intelligent people fell for--including Mumford, who got sucked in really big.

JJ: What was bad about the Garden City movement was the idea that you could take a clean slate and make a new world. That's basically artificial. There is no new world that you make without the old world. And Mumford fell for the whole "this is the twentieth century" thing--the notion that you could discard the old world completely. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

JHK: Were you friendly with Mumford, or were you adversaries?

JJ: As far as I was concerned we were friendly. It was very funny: he was furious at The Death and Life of Great American Cities--absolutely furious. He thought--and I never gave him any reason to think this--he thought that I was a protégée of his, a disciple. Because he thought that all young people who were friendly must be his disciples.

JHK: And he was furious that you turned on him?

JJ: I think that's what he thought. I first met him when I gave a talk at Harvard in 1956. I was substituting for my boss and had awful stage fright. But I gave a speech in which I attacked urban renewal. Mumford was in the audience. It was a real ordeal for me. I have no memory of giving it. I just went into a trance and recited this thing that I had memorized, then sat down. And it was a big hit. Nobody had heard anybody saying these things before. This is why Holly Whyte got me to write that article for The Exploding Metropolis--because of this speech. Anyway, Mumford was in the audience, and he very enthusiastically welcomed me, and we shook hands. I'd hypnotized myself, but I had apparently hypnotized them, too.

JHK: But then a few years later Mumford attacked you?

JJ: I met him some more times, and everything was amiable. I had my doubts about him, because we rode into the city together in a car and I watched how he acted as soon as he began to get into the city. He had been talking and all pleasant, but as soon as we got into the city he got grim, withdrawn, distressed. And it was so clear that he just hated the city, and hated being in it. And I was thinking, you know, this is the most interesting part.

JHK: I'd like to turn to economics. It seems to me that the American living arrangement, the "fiasco of suburbia" as Leon Krier calls it, is approaching a point beyond which it might be difficult to carry on. All that's necessary is a mild to moderate chronic instability in the world oil markets to throw places like Houston, Phoenix, San Jose, Miami, Las Vegas, and Atlanta into terrible trouble. We seem to be sleepwalking into an economic train wreck.

JJ: Well, I don't know whether it will happen because of the oil markets. I do know things won't go on as they are now. But people who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line from what already exists--they're always wrong. This is a continuation of what I was saying about the revolt against Victorianism. I think what's coming is one of these great generational upheavals. Not simply because people care about community or even understand it, or because of the relationship of sprawl to the ruination of the natural world. They just don't like what's around--and they will be absolutely ruthless with the remnants of it.

JHK: In your book Cities and the Wealth of Nations you talked about "the master economic process called import replacement"--the idea that a city and its region would prosper over time only if it started to furnish for itself many of the goods or services that it formerly imported. With the so-called global economy, it appears that import replacement is no longer significant given that the overwhelming majority of the products sold in the United States are made elsewhere. Is this a dangerous situation?

JJ: [Chuckles.] I think a more dangerous situation is the standardization of what is being produced or reproduced everywhere--where you can see the same products, in the same malls, in the same chains, in every city. This goes even deeper than the trouble with import-replacing, because it means that new things are not being produced locally that can be improvements. There's a sameness--this is one of the things that's boring people. But this sameness has economic implications: you don't get new products and services out of sameness. This means that somehow there's no opportunity for these thousands of flowers to bloom anymore.

JHK: The million flowers are now blooming in China. Every product I pick up is made in China. I'm not against the Chinese, but it makes you wonder how long we can go on having an advanced civilization without making anything anymore. Can we?

JJ: I don't think so. But you know we aren't complete dolts in all of this. For example, we don't manufacture our own computers. They're made mostly in Taiwan, but they aren't designed in Taiwan. Is it more important to design computers, or more important to manufacture them? I think it's vital to do both; it's fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better. But I don't think you can dismiss the constructive and inventive things that America is doing--and say, "Oh, we aren't making anything anymore. We are living off of what the poor Chinese do." It's more complicated than that. There is the example of Detroit. Look what happened when it specialized just in automobiles. Look at Manchester when it specialized in textiles, in those "dark satanic mills." It was supposed to be the city of the future.

JHK: We have an awful lot of places in America that don't specialize in anything anymore. In the region where I live--which is a kind of a mini- Rust Belt in upstate New York--one town after another has practically vanished. There is no more Utica, New York, really. No Amsterdam, New York, or Glens Falls. Economically they're gone. Is the rest of America going to be like that?

JJ: Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate. And things everywhere are not as bad as you are picturing it. For example, Portland--lots of constructive things are happening there.

JHK: I'd say Portland is in pretty good shape compared to lots of other American cities--but it ain't France.

JJ: No, it ain't. But there are lots of things about America that are better in their own way than France.

JHK: Are there other countries, other parts of the world that you particularly love or admire?

JJ: I am very fond of the Netherlands. I like the immense variety of it on a very small compass. The human scale of the whole thing and the density are far above what we are used to in North America, or anywhere. They prove that high density and human scale are not incompatible at all.

JHK: The Europeans seem to have a higher regard for city life than we do, and to do better with it. How do you account for that?

JJ: Well, you have to go back to something I don't understand and can't explain, which are these planning hysterias that went over America. I guess different kinds of hysterias swept over Europe.

JHK: They get Adolf Hitler, and we get Ed Logue.

JJ: So we are lucky. But something else amazes me about the United States versus Europe. When we are faced with the task of fixing up a riverbank--and many American cities are on rivers--we have to put in theme parks, ballparks, aquariums, all this stuff. In Europe they make granite embankments with a ramp or stairs down to the water, and it's beautiful.

JHK: You've left urbanism behind somewhat and moved on to economics. What are you working on now? Is there an idea you're galvanized by these days?

JJ: I am interested in the question of why time is such an enemy in American neighborhoods--what specific things does time threaten--and how time can be made an ally.

JHK: Are you suggesting that American neighborhoods don't regenerate themselves?

JJ: No. I think they have a very poor track record with regard to time.

JHK: And how has Greenwich Village fared over the sixty years that you have known it?

JJ: Oh, it has done very well. If other city neighborhoods had done as well there would be no trouble in cities. There are too few neighborhoods like that right now. So they are just gentrifying in the most ridiculous way. They're crowding out everybody except people with exorbitant amounts of money--which is a symptom of demand for such a neighborhood far outstripping the supply.

JHK: When I was a kid, Brooklyn was like another planet. Now it's where a whole generation has moved to in New York City.

JJ: Parts of Brooklyn are now, you might say, the outliers of my old neighborhood.