Guest Lecture by Prof. Samuel Zipp (Brown University): “Vital Little Plans: Jane Jacobs on Cities, Economies, and Morals”
Time: Tuesday, May 11, 2016, 15.00-17.00
Location: University Theatre, Room 101A, Nieuwe Doelenstraat 16-18, Amsterdam
This lecture will elaborate on Jane Jacobs and her less well-known visions on economic growth and forms of social and political organization that shape urban life.
The renowned writer, urbanist, and unconventional economics thinker Jane Jacobs is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but her famous book appeared in 1961, when she was not quite forty. At that point, she had been a writer for two decades already, responsible for dozens of articles and essays in magazines. She would go on to write six more major books and many more speeches and essays on the interlinked life of cities, economies and morals. Drawing on the forthcoming volume Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs (co-edited with Nathan Storring) Samuel Zipp will provide a talk about the philosophical vision of “organized complexity” underlying her less well understood ideas about economic growth, the proper relations between government and private enterprise, inequality and ethics, and the forms of social and political organization that shape human life, all of which drew on her initial fascination with cities.
This public lecture is co-organized by the Centre for Urban Studies, Centre for Urban History, and ASCA Cities Project.
About the speaker
Samuel Zipp is Associate Professor of American Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University. He is a cultural, intellectual, and urban historian with particular interest in 20th century cities, United States cultural and political history since World War II, the built environment, and nonfiction writing. His book Manhattan Projects: The Rise and Fall of Urban Renewal in Cold War New York is available from Oxford University Press. His co-edited volume Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs is forthcoming from Random House in October 2016.
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