And Jane Jacobs, the award-winning author and life-long community activist, has died at the age of 89. Her best known work, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” is credited with transforming ideas about urban planning. During the 1960s, Jacobs helped defeat a plan to build an expressway through New York’s Washington Square Park. Jacobs was also active in opposing the Vietnam war. Shortly after she was arrested at an anti-war protest, Jacobs and and her husband moved to Toronto, Canada in order to avoid having their taxes fund the war. Jason Epstein, her long-time editor at Random House and co-founder of the New York Review of Books, said: “[She] inspired a kind of quiet revolution. Every time you see people rise up and oppose a developer, you think of Jane Jacobs.”