Jane Jacobs Quotes

57 quotes in 791 categories

• The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
• 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…
• Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.
• Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
• The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each…
• We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.
• In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.
• 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.
• Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
• Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
• 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…
• Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
• Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.
• While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.
• New ideas often need old buildings.
• 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…
• But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed…
• Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
• 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…
• The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

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