image: Jane Jacobs by Rob Cowan for IHBC Context 184
IHBC’s members’ journal Context in June 2025 – No. 184 – focussed on ‘Leaders of conservation thought’ included Joe Holyoak on ‘Discovering Jane Jacobs’.
Joe Holyoak writes:
‘Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings,’ wrote Jane Jacobs, making the link between conservation and new ideas of urban design.
I first read Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities1 in my final year as an architecture student. We were working on what was called a town planning project in Stoke-on-Trent, and I guess it was a recommended book. (If the project were done today, it would be called an urban design project, but the term was then not yet in general use). The book had a great impact on my thoughts. Twelve years later I read it again while on my urban design masters course. As I turned the pages, I was repeatedly astonished to read what I had negligently come to assume were my own thoughts, but which had actually been formulated 20 years earlier by Jane Jacobs, and absorbed by me. Jan Morris had a similar experience, as she later recorded in the2012 festschrift called Ideas That Matter: the worlds of Jane Jacobs.
Morris writes about cities that she enjoys and says ‘I don’t really know how much of it is original to my own thought. Long ago my reasoning was Jacobsized, and all unwitting I probably joined the long ranks of her plagiarists’.
In between those two readings of Death and Life I had become a conservationist…
See HERE for the full article online and in Context 184
Context 184: CONTENTS
Themed Articles
- Editorial: Making sense of it all
- Inclusive, values-based conservation to 2008, Kate Clark
- John Ashurst: practitioner, writer and educator, Chris Wood
- SAVE at 50: celebrating half a century of campaigning Eve Blain
- Lord Kennet: making government work, Rebecca Madgin
- Discovering Jane Jacobs, Joe Holyoak
- Nineteenth-century conservation, thinking from Ruskin onwards, Duncan McCallum
Feature Articles
- Replacing Brighton Museum’s roof lantern, Edward Lewis and Olivia Stitson
- The world of generative AI, Sammy Woodford
- Old buildings and oligarchs, Ian Wray
Regular & Occasional features
- Briefing
- Letter
- Periodically, Bob Kindred MBE
- Out of Context
- The writer’s voice
- Law and policy update, Alexandra Fairclough
- Inter alia, James Caird
- Vox pop
- Reviews, Peter de Figueiredo, Reviews Editor,
IHBC Updates
- Notes from the Chair
- Director’s Cut
- New member profile
- New members
Commercial
- Products and services
- Specialist suppliers index
Reading Context helps IHBC members develop their skills across all of the IHBC’s Areas of Competence, and so is a critical baseline in addressing priorities in Continuing Professional Development (CPD)
Access the online archive and see the issue online
See more IHBC background and guidance on IHBC CPD and on how you might use past, current and future issues of Context
See the formal guidance paper on IHBC CPD (scheduled for update)
See more on the IHBC Competences and Areas of Competence
