Biography

Allan Jacobs served as the as Director of the San Francisco Department of City Planning between 1969 and 1974. He then taught in the Department of City and Regional Planning from 1975 to 2001 and twice served as its chair. Prior to teaching at Berkeley, Professor Jacobs worked on planning projects in the City of Pittsburgh and for the Ford Foundation in Calcutta, India. In 2015, he was a consultant in city planning and urban design with projects in California, Oregon, and Brazil, among others.

He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Miami University and studied at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. He received his Master’s Degree in City Planning in 1954 from the University of Pennsylvania, where he later taught. From 1954 to 1955, he was a Fulbright Scholar in City Planning at University College in London. Honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berkeley Citation, and the Kevin Lynch Award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

 

His publications include:

The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards. With Elizabeth Macdonald and Yodan Rofe. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, c2002. 

 The Good City: Reflections and Imaginations.  Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon ; New York : Routledge, 2011.

Great Streets. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, c1993.

Looking at Cities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Making City Planning Work, American Society of Planning Officials, 1978.

Biography