Jane Jacobs Quotes
Best 21 Quotes by Jane Jacobs
“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.”
Dark Age Ahead Quotes
“A living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration.”
“A vigorous culture capable of making corrective,stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding.”
“It has long been recognized that getting an education is effective for bettering oneself and one's chances in the world. But a degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous.”
“Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.”
“Some who are fortunate enough to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can't afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost.”
“Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful. A community is a complex organism with complicated resources that grow gradually and organically.”
The Death and Life of Great American Cities Quotes
“A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:
First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.
Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.
And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”
“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 effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.”
“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 people in abundance.”
“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.”
“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 definition, full of strangers.”
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
“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 of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
“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 enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.”
“The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.”
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“Girls are like pianos. When they're not upright, they're grand.”
“The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.”
“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 or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
“Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.”
“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.”
“You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.”