Quick now. What do Cranbrook, Toronto and New York have in common? Not much, you say. Well, you’re wrong. Very wrong, in fact. Despite the great disparity in size of these three cities, they have all faced a common issue and they have all been influenced by one of the most famous women in the world.

Jane Jacobs, who passed away in 2006, was an urban writer and activist who championed grass-roots, community-based planning for cities both big and small.

Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, she was self-educated and relied on personal observation and common sense to determine why some cities worked and some didn’t. Her seminal 1961 book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” virtually revolutionized urban planning and is considered the Bible of urban planning today. It also led to the “Smart Growth” movement, which to varying degrees, is now being practiced around the globe.

Jacobs, who became a Canadian in 1968 after becoming disillusioned with the role of the U.S. in the Vietnam War, had no professional training as a planner yet took on and defeated New York City’s powerful Parks Commissioner, Robert Moses, when he tried to ram through the Lower Manhattan Expressway over local opposition and demolished Pennsylvania Station to build another freeway. She was also strongly critical of many “slum-clearing” projects in New York and advocated protection of historic neighborhoods and higher density living instead of urban sprawl serviced by freeways.

After moving to Toronto, she played a major role in the “Stop Spadina Campaign” preventing construction of a major highway through one of Toronto’s most colourful neighborhoods. An advocate for “mixed-use” development, Jacobs approached cities as living beings and ecosystems. She believed that over time buildings, streets and neighbourhoods functioned as dynamic organisms changing in terms of how people reacted to them. She also believed in “bottom-up” community planning as opposed to the traditional “top-down” planning that had been the norm practiced by planners for generations.

“Her faith in the wisdom of local citizens lives on in the civic battles in which she participated and her wisdom lives on in the writing of her nine seminal books, including her final one in 2004, ‘Dark Age Ahead,’” said The Centre for the Living City at Purchase College. “Thanks to Jacobs, ideas once considered lunatic such as mixed-use development, short blocks and dense concentrations of people working and living downtown are now taken for granted,” said Adele Freedman of the Globe and Mail. “Probably no single person has done more in the last 50 years to transform our ideas about the nature of urban life,” said the Chicago Tribune. “Planners hated her book (The Death and Life of Great American Cities) when it came out, but now it’s required reading in universities around the world,” said Alexander Ross in Canadian Business.

So you see there is a connection between the iconic Jacobs and little, old Cranbrook. We may not be as big as New York and Toronto, but we’re growing, albeit slowly, and we’re planning for that growth just the same as the larger centres. And we have our own activist group here, that against all odds and the predictions of many so-called experts including this one has succeeded in forcing a referendum on the largest growth plan in the city’s history.

And contrary to what some are saying, this is not a bad thing. It’s, in fact, a very good thing no matter what your opinion is of the East Hill expansion. Any change that would almost double the size of the city and change its fundamental nature forever should have the blessing of a majority of citizens and not be simply decided by seven people sitting around a council table.

So hold on to your hats. Cranbrook is in for quite a ride the next while. Despite the unexpectedly large number of people that signed the alternate approval forms, it’s doubtful that Council will drop its plans for East Hill expansion and will indeed hold a referendum.

We’ve had referendums before for major issues like the Rec Plex and there’s no better way to get an accurate read of how the people feel as opposed to the politicians. It’s called democracy and who can disagree with that?