Jane Jacobs - City Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

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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
The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.

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

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

Jane Jacobs
There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.

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
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

Jane Jacobs
Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything—certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

Jane Jacobs
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.

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

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

Jane Jacobs
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.

Jane Jacobs
To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.

Jane Jacobs
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 attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

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