Cities Quotes by Jane Jacobs

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

— Jane Jacobs

City diversity represents accident and chaos.

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— 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

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— 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

Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's…

— Jane Jacobs

As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora…

— Jane Jacobs

The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically)…

— Jane Jacobs

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived…

— Jane Jacobs

Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities…

— Jane Jacobs

“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…

— Jane Jacobs

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but…

— Jane Jacobs

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning.…

— Jane Jacobs

In trading with each other cities can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another. Backward cities,…

— Jane Jacobs

Reformers have long observed city people loitering on busy corners, hanging around in candy stores and bars and drinking soda popon stoops,…

— Jane Jacobs

Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them… for really new…

— Jane Jacobs

“To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order…

— Jane Jacobs

“Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted…

— Jane Jacobs

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums…

— Jane Jacobs

“Ebenezer Howard’s vision of the Garden City would seem almost feudal to us. He seems to have thought that members of the…

— 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

“It is possible in a city street neighborhood to know all kinds of people without unwelcome entanglements, without boredom, necessity for excuses,…

— 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

“As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering…

— 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

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs