It was my great good fortune to have been mentored in my urban design career by Allan Jacobs, who passed away earlier this month. Jake was my professor and advisor at U.C. Berkeley, and I was fortunate to collaborate with him on The Boulevard Book after graduation. Jake, along with faculty such as Donlyn Lyndon, Paul Groth, Peter Bosselman, Randy Hester and Michael Southworth, shaped my view of what cities could be and what planners could do to bring them into being.
“Cities ought to be magnificent, beautiful places to live,” he wrote in The Good City. “They should be places where people can be fulfilled, where they can be what they can be, where there is freedom, love, ideas, excitement, quiet and joy. Cities ought to be the ultimate manifestation of society’s collective achievements.” These words resonate with me every day.
I studied with Jake at Berkeley in the late 80s, when it was still possible to save for graduate school tuition, pay for my living expenses through research and teaching assistantships, and graduate without debt, at a world-class public University. I am forever grateful the State of California for that opportunity, as well as the folks who taught there, and the students I worked with.
This sketch of Allan and me in an urban design studio was made and sent to me by one of my dearest friends from graduate school, Rick Williams. “You had pretty wild hair back in those days,” he told me in phone call when we shared our grief about this news and unpacked the ways those days in Wurster Hall shaped us as design professionals, and as citizens of the good city.
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