Jane Jacobs, who died yesterday at 89, was a New York civic activist and the visionary author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961), which helped transform urban planning from a top-down discipline to one that pays attention to actual lives and neighborhoods.

“Death and Life” was a polemic against the Urban Renewal then in favor – slum clearing and wholesale demolition of entire neighborhoods, followed by the construction of “superblocks,” tall buildings, housing projects, and other large-scale, single-purpose developments.

The book bears comparison to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published a year later in 1962, which brought attention to the interconnectedness of man and the natural environment.

Jacobs saw the city – based especially on her own city, NewYork, where she lived in the West Village – as more organic than instrumental. It was a giant pastiche of human activities that benefited from density and lack of central planning.

She disdained the automobile, streets in grids, suburbs, and the simplifying assumptions of planners, whom, she said, tend to think that a space should have a single use, envisioning giant office buildings for work, giant apartments for living, and giant roads for getting to and from them. Jacobs said that more attention to the “sidewalk ballet” of actual people fulfilling many purposes in one place would elucidate a complicated organism that should be respected and tampered with to the least extent possible.

Clearly and forcefully written, the book came near the start of a backlash against the large-scale projects of such planners as Robert Moses. “In another age,” the Wall Street Journal said in its review of the book, “the author’s enormous intellectual temerity would have ensured her destruction as a witch.”

Louis Mumford, perhaps the dean of American urban planners, applauded Jacobs for understanding the working of cities, and then dismissed her for being too concerned with crime prevention. “Mother Jacobs,” Mumford snidely called the author, who had few credentials and was indeed both a woman and a Greenwich Village housewife.

Yet perhaps it was Jacobs’s ability to look at the city with an outsider’s eye that made her keen insights possible.

Jacobs grew up in Scranton, Pa., where her education was finished when she graduated high school. After volunteering at a local newspaper for a year, she moved to New York City at the depths of the Depression.

“I had no understanding of the subway system. I just would get off the subway not knowing where I was,” she said in 2004. “One day, I emerged at Christopher Street. I went home and told my sister, ‘I know where we should live!’ The Village appealed to me because of its small scale and the shops of artisans.” She would live for many years near the spot of this epiphany, at 555 Hudson St. The neighborhood became the focus of one of her great victories as an anti-urban renewal activist, when she led the successful opposition to a 1961 city plan to tear down 16 blocks of walk-up buildings and replace them with apartment blocks.

She found occasional work as a stenographer, and learned about the city by writing freelance articles for Vogue on various neighborhoods – the fur district, the flower district – learning block by block the things that would add up to an organism when she wrote a book. Eventually, she was hired as an editor at Architectural Forum. She married Robert Jacobs,a partner in the prolific firm of Kahn & Jacobs. That he was a staunch modernist might make him sound like a poor fit, but Jacobs was no foe of new construction so long as it was well-planned; in “Death and Life,” she praised the addition of Vanderbilt Avenue in Midtown because of the views it afforded of the Union Carbide Building. In crediting her husband’s influence on her thinking, she wrote, “By this time I do not know which ideas in this book are mine and which are his.”

The great success of “Death and Life” – it has not been out of print since 1961 – gave Jacobs even more credibility as an activist, and she helped lead the (unsuccessful) opposition to the New York University library on Washington Square as well as the successful opposition to the Lower Manhattan Expressway. That project, part of Robert Moses’s master plan, would have seen a sunken roadway blasted through Wooster Street, connecting the Manhattan Bridge to the Holland tunnel, with untold effects for the Village, not to mention the demolition of much of SoHo and TriBeCa. Jacobs led a 1968 protest at a planning meeting in which it was alleged that she urged a crowd to “violent and tumultuous conduct,” including tearing up meeting notes and damaging a stenographic machine. Charged with second-degree riot, she eventually settled by agreeing to pay for the repair of the steno machine. Impressed by the public outcry, Mayor Wagner dropped his support for the project and it died. Those searching for the Jacobs legacy may worry that the precedent set in 1968 helped kill any number of potentially worthy projects in future decades, although there are few today who would defend the Wooster Street roadway.

Jacobs and her husband pulled up stakes and emigrated to Canada, inspired mainly by a desire to keep their two teenage sons out of the Vietnam draft. They settled in Toronto, which Jacobs had written about as one of her favorite cities.

The following year, in 1969, she published her second book, “The Economy of Cities,” in which she took a wider view of urban spaces in history to argue that as engines of commerce they are the most important drivers of the economy.As in “Death and Life,” she used a dazzling array of examples, drawn in this case from prehistoric sources to the effects of bicycle imports on Japan. Another book, “Cities and the Wealth of Nations,” appeared in 1984, but Jacobs peaked in terms of influence at the start. She wrote two books, “Systems of Survival” (1992) and “The Nature of Economies” (1996), which were set up as Platonic dialogs between imaginary interlocutors.The ominously titled “Dark Age Coming” appeared in 2004. Despite its prognostications of societal decline, it was still sprightly enough to include a detailed explanation of why one-way streets increase urban traffic congestion.

Jacobs became a kind of Canadian national treasure, a valued luncheon companion of Toronto’s mayor, and enough of an authority on national politics to write a book urging that Quebec be allowed to succeed on the grounds that it would be an economic boon to all. Her devotion to gemeinschaft seemed bottomless. She was a regular presence at meetings, toting a papiermache ear trumpet. Her mental acuity was unslowed, and her publisher, Random House Canada, announced at her death that she had been at work on two more books, one an anthology of her past works and the second a history of the human race in six chapters.

Jane Butzner Jacobs

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Pa.; died April 25 at a Toronto hospital after suffering a stroke; survived by her children, James, Edward, and Mary.