Vital Little Plans: Jane Jacobs on Cities, Economics and Ethics
Nathan Storring is a writer, curator and designer with a focus on interpreting architecture, city planning, and urban issues for a general audience, and co-editor of Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs. Born in Kitchener, ON, he has helped produce exhibitions and permanent exhibits at Urbanspace Gallery (Toronto, ON), the Chicago Architecture Foundation, and the Boston Society of Architects's BSA Space. Currently, he works as a communications associate at Project for Public Spaces (New York, NY), writing and conducting research about placemaking, innovation and urbanism.
VITAL LITTLE PLANS is an important book and brings together for the first time a selection of essays, articles, speeches and interviews by the late Jane Jacobs. It gives us a chance to survey Jacobs whole writing life in one volume. Through introductions and annotations, the editors, Samuel Zipp (American) and Nathan Storring (Canadian), chart Jane’s evolution as a writer, from journalist to author, major thinker, and underappreciated economist. PLUS, it features an excerpt from the never-before-seen book Jane was working on before her death. Jane is as important today as when she wrote her seminal work The Death and Life of Great American Cities back in 1961 (55 years ago!). This year is the centenary of Jane Jacobs’s birthday and there are many Jacobs projects happening throughout the year.