Where Sidewalks End: A Heartland Without Heart

Jane Jacobs’ mind was like those ideal city centers she advocated in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” — vibrant, unpredictable, diverse beyond definition, full of surprises, always inviting. Her books reproduced the sounds of a city, of that “intricate ballet” she famously wrote about when describing the best city sidewalks, “in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.” She died last week defeated, as the title of her last book implied (“Dark Ages Ahead”): At so many levels, America is chopped up, subdivided into like-minded ghettoes, unequal, largely uninterested in bridging gaps of mind, money and power. What has made it so? Read the full column...