Jane Jacobs - Cities Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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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
Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.

Jane Jacobs
Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities.

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

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

Jane Jacobs
The bureaucratized, simplified cities, so dear to present-day city planners and urban designers … run counter to the processes of city growth and economic development.

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
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
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
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
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
It's only with development and trade that poverty is overcome. The most rural places, without cities to act as their economic motors, are the poorest.

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

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

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
There are some architects, mostly working on hospitals and industrial buildings, who understand the importance of flexibility in a building. These are places where people know that buildings need to change with changes in technology, but this understanding has yet to filter down to those designing most of the ordinary buildings in our cities.

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.

Jane Jacobs
The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Jane Jacobs
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.

Jane Jacobs
What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles?... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia. What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable. The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.

Jane Jacobs