Jane Jacobs - People 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
People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.

Jane Jacobs
Unfortunately [René] Lévesque had so little self confidence in Quebec and in the people themselves, that he fell for that and, yes, he'd say, you know, it might be ruinous for us economically.

Jane Jacobs
People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.

Jane Jacobs
I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.

Jane Jacobs
I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing.

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
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
The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.

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
Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.

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

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

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