Jane Jacobs
(6" x 12")
Completed May 28, 2017

             Honestly, it's kinda fitting that I live in Portland, OR and made a piece about her, as I'm in one of many epicenters of neighborhood gentrification that she both rallied against, and helped to create. Walkable communities full of vibrant tiny shop spaces and multi-use green areas invariably seem to become both upscale and white in the process, and inevitably the streets homogenize until they're no longer communities, but playgrounds for the wealthy. Not sure where the middle-ground lies on this, but the general principal of making cities helpful to *all* their residents still applies.

"Even Jacobs recognized the limits of her philosophies, saying 'Death and Life' was not a panacea for the vast inequalities of society but that inequality would need to be addressed for any city to flourish. In the last (and possibly the least popular) book she wrote, 2004’s Dark Age Ahead, Jacobs warned that American cities would become more unequal, boring, corporate, and stricken by police brutality if we did not address underlying issues of societal decay."

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/metropolis/2016/05/happy_100th_birthday_jane_jacobs_it_s_time_to_stop_deifying_you.html