A wise planning lawyer described public consultation to me the other day as “patronise and then ignore”. The same could be said of much of the design and development industry’s relationship with Jane Jacobs, the pioneering urban campaigner and author of The Death and Life of American Cities who was born on 4 May 1916.

At first, she was ridiculed. Establishment architects, planners and city leaders decried her as a “crazy”, “militant dame”, a “housewife” writing “trash”, “junk” and “bitter coffee-house rambling.” From the left she was attacked for opposing modernist “anti-city estates” or endorsing gentrification (“de-slumming” as she termed it).