Jane Jacobs is still here : proceedings of the conference Jane Jacobs 100: her legacy and relevance in the 21st century

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was an urbanist and activist whose writings championed a fresh, community-based approach to city building. She had no formal training as a planner, and yet her 1961 treatise, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, introduced ground-breaking ideas about how cities function, evolve and fail.Jacobs’ theories and ideas are seminal to many different academic fields: urban design, planning, architecture, sociology, human geography, environmental psychology, economic geography and many more. Her writings have been influential for more than five decades. This alone tells us of her importance for urban studies and for understanding the complex relationship between urban space and society.This is reflected, among other things, in the immense popularity of Jane’s ideas among young planners and designers today. Among a number of male planners who influenced urban theory in the 20th century, Jane Jacobs distinguishes herself not only as one of the few women able to break the ceilings of this male-dominated profession, but simply as the most influential of them all. This is ironic, since Jane Jacobs would hardly see herself as a planner. On the occasion of Jane Jacobs' 100 anniversary, the chair of Spatial Planning and Strategy of the Delft University of Technology, together with the OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment and the Rotterdam Erasmus University College organised a two-day conference on Jane Jacob's legacy at TU Delft on 24-25 May 2016. This event was complemented one year later by a 'Jane Jacobs Year' closing event. We wished to celebrate the life and accomplishments of one of the most important urban thinkers of our time, someone who has influenced generations of designers and planners and others concerned with the built environment: the great Jane Jacobs. Jacobs' theories and ideas are seminal to many different academic fields: urban design, planning, architecture, sociology, human geography, environmental psychology, economic geography and many more. Her writings have been influential for more than five decades. This alone tells us of her importance for urban studies and for understanding the complex relationship between urban space and society. This is reflected, among other things, in the immense popularity of Jane's ideas among young planners and designers today. Among a number of male planners who influenced urban theory in the 20th century, Jane Jacobs distinguishes herself not only as one of the few women able to break the ceilings of this male-dominated profession, but simply as the most influential of them all. This is ironic, since Jane Jacobs would hardly see herself as a planner. Maybe, like Roberta Gratz (who was a friend of Jacobs'), she was an 'anti-planner', someone with a keen eye for careful empirical observation, for whom cities ought to be understood from the careful exploration of how the built environment influences and is influenced by human life. Jacobs was an astute observer of the life of cities and the processes that produce both cities and citizenship. In their contributions, the authors of the texts