Allan B. Jacobs, urban planner and professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley has been selected as the winner of the 1999 Kevin Lynch Award.
The award will be presented to Professor Jacobs at MIT on Saturday, April 10 as the culminating event in a symposium entitled 'Imaging the City' on the role of media in shaping the perception and change of cities and regions.
The Kevin Lynch Award carries an honorarium and is administered by MIT's Department of Urban Studies and Planning. It is presented annually to honor outstanding contributions to the making of places that invoke and capture a generous relationship between an urban place and the people who use it.
The late Kevin Lynch was a distinguished MIT alumnus, urban designer, author and member of the faculty of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning for 30 years. He helped to develop the Department of Urban Studies and Planning into one of the most renowned in the world. He died in 1984 and in 1988, family, friends and colleagues organized to establish an award in his memory. A portion of the fund supports acquisitions for MIT's Rotch Library of Architecture and Planning.
Professor Jacobs was recognized by the Award Committee for his remarkable contributions to city design over the course of a career as planner, educator and author.
The committee's citation states that: "As director of the City Planning Commission of San Francisco Allan Jacobs pioneered the integration of urban design into local government planning producing a plan that has given San Francisco some of its best places and, two decades later, still stands as a model of its kind. His book, Making City Planning Work, is a telling and accessible account of what it takes to change American cities for the better by taking cues from a careful observation, a theme he further developed in Looking at Cities published in 1985.
"His most recent book, Great Streets, is a text that has become widely revered and is used universally by students and practitioners. It has had an extraordinary influence on city design providing lucid examples and realizable principles about the making of public space."
The committee concluded that: "Allan Jacob's rich blend of research, teaching and practice, his humanity, and his dedication to public purposes, is very much in the spirit of the ideals and spirit which Kevin Lynch fostered."
