Jane Jacobs  (born Jane Butzner; May 4, 1916 - April 25, 2006) was an American-Canadian journalist, author, and activist who influenced urban studies, sociology, and economics. Her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that urban renewal did not respect the needs of city-dwellers. It also introduced the sociological concepts "eyes on the street" and "social capital". Jacobs organized grassroots efforts to protect neighborhoods from "slum clearance", in particular Robert Moses' plans to overhaul her own Greenwich Village neighborhood.

In 1935, during the Great Depression, she moved to New York City with her sister Betty. Jane Butzner took an immediate liking to Manhattan's Greenwich Village, which did not conform to the city's grid structure. The sisters soon moved there from Brooklyn.  During her early years in the city, Jacobs held a variety of jobs working as a stenographer and freelance writer, writing about working districts in the city. These experiences, she later said, "... gave me more of a notion of what was going on in the city and what business was like, what work was like." Her first job was for a trade magazine as a secretary, then an editor. She sold articles to the Sunday Herald Tribune, Cue magazine, and Vogue.  She studied at Columbia University's School of General Studies for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. About the freedom to pursue study across her wide-ranging interests, she said:  For the first time I liked school and for the first time I made good marks. This was almost my undoing because after I had garnered, statistically, a certain number of credits I became the property of Barnard College at Columbia, and once I was the property of Barnard I had to take, it seemed, what Barnard wanted me to take, not what I wanted to learn. Fortunately my high-school marks had been so bad that Barnard decided I could not belong to it and I was therefore allowed to continue getting an education.

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