Top 90 Jane Jacobs Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

3. “The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.”

— Jane Jacobs

4. “In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

6. “New ideas must use old buildings.”

— Jane Jacobs

7. “Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

9. “You can’t rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.”

— Jane Jacobs

10. “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

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

— Jane Jacobs

12. “Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city’s wealth of public life must grow.”

— Jane Jacobs

13. “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

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

— Jane Jacobs

15. “One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.”

— Jane Jacobs

16. “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

17. “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

18. “Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.”

— Jane Jacobs

19. “City diversity represents accident and chaos.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

21. “The trust of a city street is formed over time from many, many little public sidewalk contacts... Most of it is ostensibly trivial but the sum is not trivial at all.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

23. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

24. “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

25. “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

26. “Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.”

— Jane Jacobs

27. “There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

29. “Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”

— Jane Jacobs

30. “While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.”

— Jane Jacobs

31. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

32. “Innovating economies expand and develop. Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop.”

— Jane Jacobs

33. “You can’t prescribe decently for something you hate. It will always come out wrong. You can’t prescribe decently for something you despair in. If you despair of humankind, you’re not going to have good policies for nurturing human beings. I think people ought to give prescriptions who have ideas for improving things, ought to concentrate on the things that they love and that they want to nurture.”

— Jane Jacobs

34. “The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

36. “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

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

— Jane Jacobs

38. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

39. “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

40. “Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.”

— Jane Jacobs

41. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

43. “To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.”

— Jane Jacobs

44. “Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole.”

— Jane Jacobs

45. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

46. “The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost.”

— Jane Jacobs

47. “Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.”

— Jane Jacobs

48. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

49. “It is hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams.”

— Jane Jacobs

50. “When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities – from anything but cities themselves.”

— Jane Jacobs