Jane Jacobs Quotes

Quotes about:

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

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Architect, Capability

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.238, Vintage

  373 Copy quote

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

  Jane Jacobs

  Dream, Cities, Imagination

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs”, p.129, Random House

  282 Copy quote

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

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Streets, Sidewalk

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.27, Vintage

  318 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, People, Logic

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs”, p.115, Random House

  277 Copy quote

• Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

  Jane Jacobs

  Business, Successful, Errors

  286 Copy quote

• There is no new world that you make without the old world.

  Jane Jacobs

  World, Old World, New World

  Interview with James Kunstler for Metropolis Magazine, March 2001.

  65 Copy quote

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

  Jane Jacobs

  Thinking, Might, Wells

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.13, Vintage

  237 Copy quote

• 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

  Order, Cities, Different

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.222, Vintage

  258 Copy quote

• 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, People, Giving

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.111, Vintage

  206 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Safe, City Streets

  Jane Jacobs (1989). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Vintage

  197 Copy quote

• 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

  Responsibility, Successful, Cities

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.82, Vintage

  243 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Ballet, Improvisation

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.50, Vintage

  225 Copy quote

• 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

  Small Changes, Cities, Wealth

  "The Death and Life of Great American Cities".

  167 Copy quote

• 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.

  Jane Jacobs

  Order, Cities, Numbers

  154 Copy quote

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

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Support, Pieces

  Jane Jacobs (1989). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, Vintage

  170 Copy quote

• Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Underestimate, Never Underestimate

  Source: www.metropolismag.com

  22 Copy quote

• 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 Jacobs

  Cities, Creative, Together

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs”, p.243, Random House

  210 Copy quote

• Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

  Jane Jacobs

  Errors, Cities, Design

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.6, Vintage

  86 Copy quote

• The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

  Jane Jacobs

  Cities, Choices, Multiplicity

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.340, Vintage

  85 Copy quote

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

  Jane Jacobs

  People, Traffic, Vehicle

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.229, Vintage

  16 Copy quote

• New ideas must use old buildings

  Jane Jacobs

  Ideas, Old Buildings, Use

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.188, Vintage

  25 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Mistake, Order

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.373, Vintage

  151 Copy quote

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

  Jane Jacobs

  Responsibility, Ties, People

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.82, Vintage

  171 Copy quote

• When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

  Jane Jacobs

  Art, Cities, Done

  Jane Jacobs (2016). “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”, p.372, Vintage

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Cities, Ideas, People

  111 Copy quote

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