Explore Quotes by Jane Jacobs

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

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.

Design is people.

To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves.

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.

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

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 second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.

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

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

This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

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.

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.

A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.

This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.

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.

New ideas must use old buildings

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.