When urban renewal threatened her West Village neighborhood, Jacobs marshaled the discourse of sociability in opposition. Her defense of diversity, density, and mixed-use districts arose from her journalism, her knowledge of East Harlem, and her study of ecology. Ecology gave her the language and the credibility to defend fragile city districts and to challenge as unscientific those who thought of slum clearance or highway construction as simple problems. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), Jacobs crafted what Herbert Gans called a “badly needed urban myth” (Gans, 1969, p. 30) for a society that underestimated the value of public experience.