Jane Jacobs - The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

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Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?

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
Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jane Jacobs
The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

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

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
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
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
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