Jane Jacobs Quotes

We've got a [Canadian] prime minister who seems to be intent on destroying our health system and education system. But I have gotten a thicker skin. I can get angry about these things without feeling like vomiting, if you know what I mean.

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.

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

New ideas often need old buildings.

I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.

I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.

Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.

Americans have got it so dinged into them that they are the most fortunate people on Earth, and that the rest of the world - the sooner it copies what America is like, the better.

It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time.

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.

New ideas must use old buildings

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.

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.

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.

The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.

One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.

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

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

There were lots of programs over the course of the two referendums and the general tenor of them was that if Quebec were to separate, then Canada would disintegrate.

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.

I basically don't think that the way we do things is that dependent on one resource, such as oil. There can be different kinds of engines for cars. I think that solar heating, wind heating can substitute for a lot of uses for oil. I'd like to see those things happen because they are more sustainable in any case. But I do not think that running out of oil is not going to bother us that much. I think we have got to be rescued by something or we really are going down a slippery slope.

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.

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

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.

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

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.

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

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.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

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

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.

Some men tend to cling to old intellectual excitements, just as some belles, when they are old ladies, still cling to the fashions and coiffures of their exciting youth.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think that you can dispose of the constructive and inventive things that America is doing - and say, "Oh we aren't doing anything anymore and we are living off of what the poor Chinese do." It is more complicated than that. There is the example of Detroit which was once a very prosperous and diverse city. And look what happened when it just specialized on automobiles. Look at Manchester when it specialized in those dark satanic mills, when it specialized in textiles. It was supposed to be the city of the future.

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

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.

There are two ways you encounter things in the world that are different. One is everything that comes in reinforces what you already believe and everything that you know. The other thing is that you stay flexible enough or curious enough and maybe unsure of yourself enough, or may be you are more sure of yourself - I don't know which it is - that the new things that come in keep reforming your world view.

The Victorian house and lots of other buildings weren't oppressive in themselves. They were often very airy and gingerbready and fancy. But they were associated with all this [Victorian] stuffiness.

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.

The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.