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We are now a predominantly urban species, with over 50% of humanity living in a city. The overwhelming majority of these are not old post-industrial world cities such as London or New York, but large chaotic sprawls of the industrialising world such as the "maximum cities" of Mumbai or Guangzhou. Here the infrastructures are layered, ad-hoc, adaptive and personal - people there really are walking architecture, as Archigram said.

Hacking post-industrial cities is becoming a necessity also. The "shrinking cities" project is monitoring the trend in the west toward dwindling futures for cities such as Detroit and Liverpool.

Samuel Zipp, an urban and cultural historian at Brown University, argued that Jacobs needed to be understood in the context of the 1960s.

“Jane Jacobs is not often included in media or historical accounts of that time, but she belongs there — just the same, I think — as much or even more than familiar icons of that time,” he said.

In some ways she left a “confusing legacy,” he said. On the one hand, she was arrested for protesting the Vietnam War and eventually moved from New York to Toronto, with her draft-age sons, in protest.

On the other hand, her strongest arguments against urban renewal were embraced by conservatives, like Martin Anderson, who believed that urban renewal was a “big-government boondoggle” and later went to work in the Nixon administration. Her ideas about individuals and organizations thriving outside of a formal framework of municipal governance appealed to libertarians.

“Jacobs had very little patience with attempts to pin her down politically, to put her on one side of the political spectrum or the other,” Dr. Zipp said. He argued that Jacobs’s legacy was similarly nuanced.

On the one hand, “it’s true more community-oriented structures have been put in place to give ordinary people more say” in planning decisions, he said, “but at the same time, the imperatives of the private market – dominated by corporate developers,” seem more influential in shaping cities’ future than ever.

The last panelist was Roberta Brandes Gratz, a writer, preservationist and founder of the Eldridge Street Project.

Ms. Gratz argued that Jacobs’s ideas were intimately connected with Greenwich Village, the neighborhood most closely associated with Jacobs. Ms. Gratz said that people tend to assume that Jacobs’s ideas were overly based on the Village — when in fact they are applicable to neighborhoods and cities everywhere. Ms. Gratz also said that people incorrectly assume that Jacobs would have disliked today’s Village.

“The Village, as gentrified as people may think, is as dense, diversified, quintessentially urban today as it was in Jane’s day,” Ms. Gratz asserted. “Families, singles, elderly, immigrants, small shopkeepers and large — all still populate the district, as reflected in the great variety of children’s clothing stores, or adult single hangouts. What is wrong with the Village today is wrong with the whole city and in fact the country. The squeezing out of the working lass and the rising costs of housing and other essentials are a fact of American life, not just Village life. This is totally in keeping with Jacobs’s writing.”

Ms. Gratz, who knew Jacobs, added:

Jane’s ideas are not frozen in time. She never expected change not to occur. The process of change – the process of change – is what concerned her most, how it was managed and how intimately involved in shaping that change were the citizens affected by that change. Furthermore her ideas were never static. She loathed ideology and bristled at any suggestion that her ideas added up to a theory. Sadly, she was in the process of writing a new book on economics that would undoubtedly reflect some adjustments to hear earlier thoughts. And yes, she was embraced by the left and the right and she was totally amused by that, b/c she hated ideology of any stripe and she didn’t deny the embrace, because she was conservative economically, yes. She did not believe in big federal funding programs, which is where she shared with Martin Anderson.

Ms. Gratz argued that the role of West Village Houses — a moderate-income development consisting of 42 five-story walkups, two units per floor — has “never been properly acknowledged.” It was a “community-designed alternative” to an urban renewal scheme that would have destroyed 14 blocks of the West Village.

The talk was entitled “Can One Woman (Still) Make a Difference?” and Ms. Gratz attempted an answer: “Can someone like Jacobs have singular impact on the city today? Maybe not on the whole city, but the city, after all, is only the sum of its parts, i.e., its neighborhoods.”

Her view of cities startled long-held perceptions. In her 1969 book, The Economy of Cities, Mrs. Jacobs challenged the dogma of agricultural primacy and created a debate on both the economic growth and stagnation of cities.

“Current theory in many fields — economics, history, anthropology — assumed that cities are built upon a rural economic base,’’ she wrote.

“If my observations and reasonings are correct, the reverse is true: that is rural economies, including agricultural work, are directly built upon city economies and city work.”

“For me,” John Sewell, a former mayor of Toronto recalled, “the most significant influence was in terms of the notion that cities drive economies, not provincial or national governments.”

“She’s the one who propagated the thought, and I think she’s dead right.” Robert Lucas of the University of Chicago — the 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics — liked Mrs. Jacob’s theories.

“I like her sttyle,” he was quoted. “That kind of stepping back from facts and asking, what kind of economics produced this idea, is just a natural thing for an economist to do. I think everybody in economics finds her work very congenial for that reason.’’

“I think I was rather fortunate in having wonderful school teachers in the first and second grade. They taught me almost everything I knew in school.

“From the third grade on, I’m sorry to say, they were nice people, but they were dopes.’”

she had no time for ideology.

“I think ideologies, no matter what kind, are one of the greatest afflictions because they blind us to seeing what’s going on or what’s being done,’’ she was quoted.

“I’m kind of an atheist,” she said. “As for being a rightist or a leftist, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I think ideologies are blinders.”

“I think I’m living in a marvellous age when great change is occurring. We now see that there is no straight-line cause and effect; things are connected by webs.

“This understanding comes from advances in the life-sciences, and it opens up the possibility of understanding all kinds of things we haven’t understood before. I think it’s very exciting.”