What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? ... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia. What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong. — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them… for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share
The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism. — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design. — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
“Development isn't a collection of things but rather a process that yields things. Not knowing this, governments, their development and aid agencies, the World Bank, and much of the public put faith in a fallacious 'Thing Theory' of development. The Thing Theory supposes that development is the result of possessing things such as factories, dams, schools, tractors, whatever- often bunches… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share
“Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.” — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
“I tis hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams. Expressways and their ramps are examples. Moreover, even in the case of large… — Jane Jacobs Copy Share Image
