11/20/00--Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review, BC's Carroll School of Management, and the University's Burns Library recently held a celebratory symposium in honor of author Jane Jacobs. The symposium, "Jane Jacobs and the New Urban Ecology," took place on November 18 and drew a crowd of over 200 people.

A giant in the field of urban design and planning for more than 40 years, Jane Jacobs published "Death and Life of Great American Cities" in 1961, the first in a series of works devoted to the evolution of cities and urban planning. The book was hailed by the New York Times as "perhaps the most influential single work in the history of town planning." Her papers have been donated to Boston College as a permanent resource for scholarship in the area of land and urban development, and are housed in the Burns Library.

"We were privileged to be able to host Jane Jacobs at Boston College Law School," said Zygmunt Plater, BCLS Professor and expert in environmental law. "She has been probably the 20th century's single most important voice in shaping our understanding of the human dynamics of urban development."

The symposium chronicled the continuing force of Jane Jacobs' past and present work as it has shaped and continues to shape the new generations of urban ecology and land use in the 21st century. Papers presented at the symposium, as well as a contribution from Ms. Jacobs in essay form, will be published in the spring 2001 edition of the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review.

Among the speakers besides Jane Jacobs were the urban historian Sam Bass Warner; William Shutkin, BCLS adjunct professor and author of "The Land that Could Be: Environmentalism and Democracy in the 21st Century;" Jon Witten, BCLS adjunct professor of Land Use; Carl Anthony of the San Francisco New Habitat initiative; MIT Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning Anne Whiston Spirn; Jay Wickersham, Assistant Secretary of Environmental Affairs for Massachusetts and Director of the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act (MEPA) Office; Archon Fung, Asst. Prof. of Public Policy at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University; and The Boston Globe's Pulitzer Prize-winning Architecture Critic Robert Campbell.

The symposium was also co-sponsored by Boston College Law School, the Office of the Academic Vice President, the College of Arts and Sciences, and The New Ecology, Inc.