“Exuberant Episodes of Import Replacing”: Two Tributes to Jane Jacobs

The collection of lectures and publications from the Schumacher Center for a New Economics represents some of the foremost voices on a new economics. In these lectures, Susan Witt and Judy Wicks pay tribute to Jane Jacobs, legendary urban activist and visionary. Witt speaks to the warmth of Jacobs's spirit, reflecting on how she championed "ideas that matter". She was a supporter of the micro-credit program launched in Great Barrington by the Schumacher Center, calling regional currencies one of the most elegant tools for stimulating and regulating production and trade in a region. Wicks describes how Jacobs's writing became a source of inspiration for her work with a group in her community known as the Sansom Committee, which successfully fought to save the block on Sansom Street where Wicks lived from being demolished to make way for a mall. Jacobs, who saw cities as a natural eco-system for human beings, fought throughout her career to protect urban diversity and human scale from urban renewal.