Jane Jacobs Quotes

57 quotes in 791 categories

• City diversity represents accident and chaos.
• Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
• There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring…
• To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
• You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.
• The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby…
• Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to…
• You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood…
• (The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
• ...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.
• By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.
• Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
• Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
• [Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by…
• Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have…
• Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
• Design is people.

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