Jane Jacobs Medal
The Jane Jacobs Medal is administered annually by the Municipal Art Society of New York (MAS) through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. The Medal is awarded to two individuals each year whose work creates new ways of seeing and understanding New York City, challenges traditional assumptions and creatively uses the urban environment to make New York City a place of hope and expectation.
The recipients of the Rockefeller Foundation’s 2011 Jane Jacobs Medal are Robert De Niro and Jane Rosenthal, film producers and founders of the Tribeca FilmFestival, for Lifetime Leadership, and Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the New York City Department of Transportation (DOT) and Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, for New Ideas and Activism.
Last year’s recipients were Elizabeth Barlow Rogers, founding President of the Central Park Conservancy and current president of the Foundation for Landscape Studies, and Joshua David and Robert Hammond, co-founders of Friends of the High Line. Previous years’ recipients include Damaris Reyes, executive director of Good Old Lower East Side (GOLES), and Founder and CEO of the Urban Assembly Richard Kahan in 2009; Peggy Shepard, executive director and co-founder of West Harlem Environmental Action, Inc. (WE ACT), and Alexie Torres-Fleming, founder of Youth Ministries for Peace and Justice (YMPJ) in 2008; and Barry Benepe of New York City’s Greenmarket program and Omar Freilla of Greenworker Cooperatives in the Bronx in 2007.
