Jane Jacobs Quotes

Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

Design is people.

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

City diversity represents accident and chaos.

Observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.

The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.

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

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 arouse awe and wonder.

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 order.

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.

When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

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

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.

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

Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.

This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.

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.

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

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

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

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 our plans.

A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)

The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.

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

The Puerto Ricans who come to our cities today have no place to roast pigs outdoors...

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

New ideas often need old buildings.

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

New ideas must use old buildings

Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.

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

We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.

Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.

Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.

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.

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

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.

One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.