Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006

JANE JACOBS, the groundbreaking urban thinker who died Tuesday, never made her home in Boston, but she had strong views on how the city had changed and great affection for one neighborhood that hadn't: the North End. Her 1961 book, ''The Death and Life of Great American Cities," influenced many people who would guide development of the city in the 1970s and '80s -- and more by what they didn't build than what they did.

''It was a great experience to read her book," said Frederick Salvucci, former state secretary of transportation in a telephone interview yesterday. ''She was writing what I was thinking."

Jacobs wasn't antiautomobile, but she detested expressways that cut through urban neighborhoods. In the 1960s, she helped defeat a plan to slice a highway through Greenwich Village in Manhattan, where she lived. Salvucci and other activists drew inspiration from her insights as they fought to spare Boston and Cambridge from the Inner Belt and the Southwest Expressway.

Jacobs didn't have much use for the concept of high buildings scattered about plazas: ''vertical concentrations of people, separated by vacuities," she called them. ''She altered the way people thought about cities," said Beatrice Nessen, one of the leaders of the successful struggle to prevent construction of Park Plaza, a high-rise complex between Tremont and Arlington streets in the 1970s.

''Her book was a beacon," said Stephen Coyle, who read it as an undergraduate at Brandeis. When he became director of the Boston Redevelopment Authority in 1984, Jacobs's insights guided BRA policy to insist on active public uses for the first floors of commercial buildings. Jacobs's thinking guided the authority as it stressed the necessity of neighborhood input into development. ''She allowed alternative thinking to grow up, that all wisdom did not reside in those in power, " Coyle said.

Jacobs is given credit for the concepts behind the creation of Quincy Market, which gave the city a common meeting space she found lacking in 1961. She liked best, however, the messiness of life in Greenwich Village or the North End, and her ideal urban village was enlivened by the frolic of children, which was the norm when she wrote ''Death and Life," during the postwar baby boom.

These two remain successful neighborhoods, but gentrification has largely robbed them of large families. ''The streets were alive with children playing, people shopping, people strolling, people talking," she wrote of a visit to the North End in 1959. New advocates for the cities will have to devise ways to get life in all its varieties back to the urban spaces that Jacobs loved.