Jane Jacobs Quotes

110 Sourced Quotes

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

Jane Jacobs
I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment. I was encouraged to believe that simple conformity results in stagnation for a society, and that American progress has been largely owing to the opportunity for experimentation, the leeway given initiative, and to a gusto and a freedom for chewing over odd ideas.

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
I think the people of Los Angeles should take a long look at the concept of preservation, and not put so much faith in the belief that the tastes of this particular decade are the right ones.

Jane Jacobs
But look what we have built.... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

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

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

Jane Jacobs
There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.

Jane Jacobs
A common mistake is for people to look at a distressed part of a city and ask what's wrong with it. But they don't consider what's already there and look at those things as assets. If the museums, cathedrals and concert halls are designed as additions to an existing mixture, they're likely to have a constructive effect.

Jane Jacobs
In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the big city, everyone does not — only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.

Jane Jacobs
Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
Architecture and site planning have changed since I wrote my first book. But it's because what they were doing so obviously didn't work. And yet, you still find the same kind of stupid mega-projects being pushed, and we still have politicians who aren't interested unless it's something big and ostentatious.

Jane Jacobs
I think what's happened to Los Angeles is much more promising than if the city had held onto the big defense contracts and aerospace jobs. That might have been called stability, but it would have been foretelling a great abyss for the future.

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

Jane Jacobs
Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.

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

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

Jane Jacobs
The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

Jane Jacobs
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. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.

Jane Jacobs
Today, I'm not so optimistic. I hope I'm wrong. But then, there's always young people coming along, and there's always the old geezers who are dying off, and that's the greatest reason for optimism in the world.

Jane Jacobs
It is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

Jane Jacobs
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 of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.

Jane Jacobs
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 parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

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.

Jane Jacobs
I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there. So I was roaming the city in the afternoons and applying for jobs in the morning. And one day I found myself in a neighborhood I just liked so much…it was one of those times I had put a nickel in and just invested something. And where did I get out? I just liked the sound of the name: Christopher Street — so I got out at Christopher Street, and I was enchanted with this neighborhood, and walked around it all afternoon and then I rushed back to Brooklyn. And I said, "Betty I found out where we have to live."

Jane Jacobs
Cities are the mothers of economic development, not because people are smarter in cities, but because of the conditions of density. There is a concentration of need in cities, and a greater incentive to address problems in ways that haven't been addressed before. This is the essence of economic development. Without it, we'd all be poor.

Jane Jacobs
Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.

Jane Jacobs