Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.

PubliJane Jacobsd in 1980 and reprinted in 2011 with a previously unpubliJane Jacobsd 2005 interview on the subject Jacobs' book advances the view that Quebec's eventual independence is best for Montreal Toronto the rest of Canada and the world; and that such independence can be achieved peacefully. She calls these two patterns "Moral Syndrome A" or commercial moral syndrome and "Moral Syndrome B" or guardian moral syndrome. C.

She has been accused of inattention to racial inequality and her concept of "unslumming" has been compared with gentrification. As a female writer and mother who criticized experts in the male-dominated field of urban planning Jacobs endured scorn from establiJane Jacobsd figures who called her a "housewife" and a "crazy dame". Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) argued that urban renewal did not respect the needs of most city-dwellers.