Jane Jacobs Quotes

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

But look what we have built ... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

New ideas must use old buildings

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.

To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.

Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.

Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.

Just the way in Europe, Paris, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, and Frankfurt, possibly and Berlin, certainly, all had important roles, because of independence. Because they were depending on themselves.

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

New ideas often need old buildings.

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.

City diversity represents accident and chaos.

(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)

Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work but only the kind of quick, easy outer impression that they get.

It is hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams.