Jane Jacobs

You don't get new products and services out of sameness.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

“The Puerto Ricans who come to our cities today have no place to roast pigs outdoors...”

— Jane Jacobs

Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.

— Jane Jacobs

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that…

— Jane Jacobs

I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.

— Jane Jacobs

I am not any hate-America person. I really came here for positive reasons.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

“A city park in this fix, afflicted (for in such cases it is an affliction) with a good-sized terrain, is figuratively in…

— Jane Jacobs

I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these…

— Jane Jacobs

Unfortunately [René] Lévesque had so little self confidence in Quebec and in the people themselves, that he fell for that and, yes,…

— Jane Jacobs

We've got a [Canadian] prime minister who seems to be intent on destroying our health system and education system. But I have…

— Jane Jacobs

“There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely…

— Jane Jacobs

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no…

— Jane Jacobs

In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you.…

— Jane Jacobs

Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core…

— Jane Jacobs

“A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as…

— Jane Jacobs

Why did I become a Canadian citizen? Not because I was rejecting being a U.S. citizen. At the time when I became…

— Jane Jacobs

The second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big…

— Jane Jacobs

Let's see in those indictments you can't level at Sweden, they never tried to ban the constitution or undermine the settlement that…

— Jane Jacobs

poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is…

— Jane Jacobs

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible.…

— Jane Jacobs

“[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with…

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.

— Jane Jacobs

“Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

“When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.”

— Jane Jacobs

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

— Jane Jacobs

Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

— Jane Jacobs