Top 93 Jane Jacobs Quotes
#1. While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.
Jane Jacobs
#2. A vigorous culture capable of making corrective,stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding.
Jane Jacobs
#3. Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
Jane Jacobs
#4. While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.
Jane Jacobs
#5. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#6. Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.
Jane Jacobs
#7. Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
Jane Jacobs
#8. Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
Jane Jacobs
#9. The Puerto Ricans who come to our cities today have no place to roast pigs outdoors...
Jane Jacobs
#10. In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.
Jane Jacobs
#11. This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
Jane Jacobs
#12. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#13. There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.
Jane Jacobs
#14. Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.
Jane Jacobs
#15. Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
Jane Jacobs
#16. 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?
Jane Jacobs
#17. Intricacy that counts is mainly intricacy at eye level, change in the rise of ground, groupings of trees, openings leading to various focal points - in short, subtle expressions of difference. The subtle differences in setting are then exaggerated by the differences in use that grow up among them.
Jane Jacobs
#18. Some who are fortunate enough to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can't afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost.
Jane Jacobs
#19. the presence of buildings around a park is important in design. They enclose it. They make a definite shape out of the space, so that it appears as an important event in the city scene, a positive feature, rather than a no-account leftover.
Jane Jacobs
#20. Another thing: a living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration.
Jane Jacobs
#21. Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole
Jane Jacobs
#22. Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
Jane Jacobs
#23. Observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.
Jane Jacobs
#24. As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
Jane Jacobs
#25. This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.
Jane Jacobs
#26. You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.
Jane Jacobs
#27. Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
Jane Jacobs
#28. Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.
Jane Jacobs
#29. Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
Jane Jacobs
#30. Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
Jane Jacobs
#31. People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.
Jane Jacobs
#32. Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.
Jane Jacobs
#33. Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Jane Jacobs
#34. We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.
Jane Jacobs
#35. Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
Jane Jacobs
#36. Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.
Jane Jacobs
#37. (The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
Jane Jacobs
#38. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.
Jane Jacobs
#39. Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.
Jane Jacobs
#40. There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.
Jane Jacobs
#41. No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.
Jane Jacobs
#42. It has long been recognized that getting an education is effective for bettering oneself and one's chances in the world. But a degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous.
Jane Jacobs
#43. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#44. In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
Jane Jacobs
#45. Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
Jane Jacobs
#46. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#47. When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.
Jane Jacobs
#48. The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up.
Jane Jacobs
#49. The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.
Jane Jacobs
#50. The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
Jane Jacobs
#52. The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts ... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.
Jane Jacobs
#53. To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
Jane Jacobs
#54. City diversity represents accident and chaos.
Jane Jacobs
#55. What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its towering-sided canyons, are its magnificence.
Jane Jacobs
#57. Innovating economies expand and develop. Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop.
Jane Jacobs
#58. Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.
Jane Jacobs
#59. When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.
Jane Jacobs
#60. Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
Jane Jacobs
#61. Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything
certainly not one with much downtown diversity.
Jane Jacobs
#62. It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.
Jane Jacobs
#63. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#64. It is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.
Jane Jacobs
#65. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.
Jane Jacobs
#66. I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.
Jane Jacobs
#68. Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.
Jane Jacobs
#69. [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.
Jane Jacobs
#70. Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.
Jane Jacobs
#71. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#72. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#73. By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.
Jane Jacobs
#74. Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
Jane Jacobs
#75. All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.
Jane Jacobs
#76. Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but in most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not - only those you choose to tell will know much about you.
Jane Jacobs
#77. A border
the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory
forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.
Jane Jacobs
#78. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#79. The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.
Jane Jacobs
#80. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#81. A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
Jane Jacobs
#82. Marshall Shafter ... kept pasted in his desk drawer a piece of paper he looked at from time to time to remind himself of something. It said, A fool can put on his own clothes better than wise man can do it for him.
Jane Jacobs
#83. Poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development.
Jane Jacobs
#84. Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.
Jane Jacobs
#85. I tis hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams. Expressways and their ramps are examples. Moreover, even in the case of large parks, campuses or waterfronts, the barrier effects can likely be overcome well only along portions of perimeters.
Jane Jacobs
#86. It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time.
Jane Jacobs
#87. 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.
Jane Jacobs
#88. Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center - at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax.
Jane Jacobs
#89. The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.
Jane Jacobs
#90. Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life must grow.
Jane Jacobs
#91. The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost.
Jane Jacobs
#92. Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
Jane Jacobs
#93. The second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.
Jane Jacobs
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