Maybe I shall start with the modernist movement. Whether it was good, or whether it was a somewhat hollow marketing gimmick.
Whether that was good for mankind or not so good for mankind. I met her personally, rather late, during a visit to Toronto, on her porch. That handwritten letter is now framed in my office. She wrote me this two page letter about busted knees and “how lucky I was that it was a ‘mechanical’ failure and not a medical failure, because mechanical things can be mended.” She hoped that I would soon be fresh again and that I could come to Toronto and together we could do something for the city. Jane heard about it through some people who had seen me in Copenhagen. I’d busted my leg badly and was in a wheelchair. At some point later I sent a couple of books of mine, in English, to Jane, and we soon had a nice correspondence.
Also, my books had not yet appeared in English. So I taught Jacobs while in Toronto, but I never approached her. She hated local academics who interrupted her work. But I didn’t meet her that year, because we were strictly told by the school of architecture that she was not to be disturbed. Jane was living down on Albany Avenue, a few blocks away. I lived in Toronto in 1972/73, teaching at the university. I was just writing today about my relationship with her, because some people are writing a book about my life. They just thought that the city was deteriorating with all this traffic and they had to do something. And they didn’t know a thing about Jane Jacobs. I can also tell you another thing: in 1962, a year after her book came out, the city council in Copenhagen closed one kilometer of the main street and turned it into a car-free street. They were reacting to the motor car invasion. And what was overlooked was how all this influenced people’s lives. We looked at that and thought: there’s something wrong here, something must have been overlooked. We were incensed to see how traffic was ruining the cities and how insensitive architects and planners were putting up suburbs and modernistic residential areas in concrete blocks. My wife and I had started to study how the built form influenced people’s behavior. But her book was highly inspiring, especially in relation to my research. I only learned to know fear in 1972, when I visited North America for the first time. I can remember my enormous surprise that the first chapter was on sidewalk safety, because that was not an issue in this part of Europe at that time.
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