Jane Jacobs Quotes

57 quotes in 791 categories

• The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.
• 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…
• 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…
• Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule...[Residents] regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is,…
• 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…
• Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
• I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed,…
• 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…
• 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.…
• In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
• 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…
• 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…
• New ideas must use old buildings
• A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
• 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…
• 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.
• Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
• This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
• 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.
• People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

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