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 JacobsRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
A bustling city street fosters safety through community presence, while deserted streets tend to harbor danger.
Jane Jacobs emphasizes the importance of active urban spaces in promoting safety. When a street is busy with people, it creates a sense of community and vigilance that naturally deters crime. Conversely, a deserted street lacks this dynamic social interaction, making it more susceptible to unsafe behaviors and events. The underlying argument suggests that urban design and human presence are critical in ensuring safety in cities.
Themes
SafetyUrbanCommunityCrimeDesign
In practice
Example use cases
In a neighborhood watch meeting, this quote could be used to highlight the importance of community engagement.
More from Jane Jacobs
All quotes βIt 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 JacobsRead
Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
Jane JacobsRead
(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
Jane JacobsRead
Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
Jane JacobsRead
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
Jane JacobsRead
Similar quotes
Thus it happens in matters of state; for knowing afar off (which it is only given a prudent man to do) the evils that are brewing, they are easily cured. But when, for want of such knowledge, they are allowed to grow so that everyone can recognize them, there is no longer any remedy to be found.
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Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time and in the same place.
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Most social acts have to be understood in their setting, and lose meaning if isolated.
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The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.
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Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology.
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Feminism is dated? Yes, for privileged women like my daughter and all of us here today, but not for most of our sisters in the rest of the world who are still forced into premature marriage, prostitution, forced labor - they have children that they don't want or they cannot feed.
Isabel AllendeRead