Top 90 Jane Jacobs Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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

52. “It 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 Jacobs

53. “When distance and convenience sets in; the small, the various and the personal wither away.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

55. “Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn’t be relied on to guard henhouses.”

— Jane Jacobs

56. “Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?”

— Jane Jacobs

57. “Intricacy that counts is mainly intricacy at eye level, change in the rise of ground, groupings of trees, openings leading to various focal points – in short, subtle expressions of difference. The subtle differences in setting are then exaggerated by the differences in use that grow up among them.”

— Jane Jacobs

58. “Some who are fortunate enough to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can’t afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost.”

— Jane Jacobs

59. “Owing to the corner pick-up stops required in any case by buses, the short signal frequencies interfere with bus travel time less than long signal frequencies. These same shorter frequencies, unstaggered, constantly hold up and slow down private transportation, which would thereby be discouraged from using these particular streets. In turn, this would mean still less interference and more speed for buses.”

— Jane Jacobs

60. “Privacy is precious in cities. It is indispensable. Perhaps it is precious and indispensable everywhere, but in most places you cannot get it. In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not – only those you choose to tell will know much about you.”

— Jane Jacobs

61. “There is no new world that you make without the old world.”

— Jane Jacobs

62. “Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.”

— Jane Jacobs

63. “Another thing: a living culture is forever changing, without losing itself as a framework and context of change. The reconstruction of a culture is not the same as its restoration.”

— Jane Jacobs

64. “Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.”

— Jane Jacobs

65. “Overcrowding, which is one symptom of the population instability, continues. It continues, not because the overcrowded people remain, but because they leave. Too many of those who overcome the economic necessity to overcrowd get out, instead of improving their lot within the neighborhood. They are quickly replaced by others who currently have little economic choice. The buildings, naturally, wear out with disproportionate swiftness under these conditions.”

— Jane Jacobs

66. “Two parents, to say nothing of one, cannot possibly satisfy all the needs of a family-household. A community is needed as well, for raising children, and also to keep adults reasonably sane and cheerful. A community is a complex organism with complicated resources that grow gradually and organically.”

— Jane Jacobs

67. “Probably the most important element in intricacy is centering. Good small parks typically have a place somewhere within them commonly understood to be the center – at the very least a main crossroads and pausing point, a climax.”

— Jane Jacobs

68. “There are only two ultimate public powers in shaping and running American cities: votes and control of the money. To sound nicer, we may call these “public opinion” and “disbursement of funds,” but they are still votes and money.”

— Jane Jacobs

69. “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

70. “Working places and commerce must be mingled right in with residences if men, like the men who work on or near Hudson Street, for example, are to be around city children in daily life – men who are part of normal daily life, as opposed to men who put in an occasional playground appearance while they substitute for women or imitate the occupations of women.”

— Jane Jacobs

71. “There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.”

— Jane Jacobs

72. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

73. “And so, each day, several thousand more acres of our countryside are eaten by the bulldozers, covered by pavement, dotted with suburbanites who have killed the thing they thought they came to find.”

— Jane Jacobs

74. “Privately run jails are a mark of American “reinvented government” that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.”

— Jane Jacobs

75. “Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.”

— Jane Jacobs

76. “Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.”

— Jane Jacobs

77. “In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not – only those you choose to tell will know much about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people, whether their incomes are high or their incomes are low, whether they are white or colored, whether they are old inhabitants or new, and it is a gift of great-city life deeply cherished and jealously guarded.”

— Jane Jacobs

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

— Jane Jacobs

79. “It has long been recognized that getting an education is effective for bettering oneself and one’s chances in the world. But a degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous.”

— Jane Jacobs

80. “In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.”

— Jane Jacobs

81. “Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything – certainly not one with much downtown diversity.”

— Jane Jacobs

82. “The desirability of segregating dwellings from work has been so dinned into us that it takes an effort to look at real life and observe that residential districts lacking mixture with work do not fare well in cities.”

— Jane Jacobs

83. “If the neighborhood were to lose the industries, it would be a disaster for us residents. Many enterprises, unable to exist on residential trade by itself, would disappear. Or if the industries were to lose us residents, enterprises unable to exist on the working people by themselves would disappear.”

— Jane Jacobs

84. “The only guide which I feel that I can follow is not the fluctuating dicta of those who are victors in the battle for popularity at a given moment, but my own understanding of the American tradition in which I was brought up.”

— Jane Jacobs

85. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

86. “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.”

— Jane Jacobs

87. “There are only two ultimate public powers in shaping and running American cities: votes and control of the money.”

— Jane Jacobs

88. “Googie architecture could... be seen in its finest flowering among the essentially homogeneous and standardized enterprises of roadside commercial strips: hot-dog stands in the shape of hot dogs, ice-cream stands in the shape of ice-cream cones. There are obvious examples of virtual sameness trying, by dint of exhibitionism, to appear unique and different from their similar commercial neighbors.”

— Jane Jacobs

89. “Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect.”

— Jane Jacobs

90. “The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world.”

— Jane Jacobs

91. “This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.”

— Jane Jacobs

92. “Our difficulty is no longer how to contain people densely in metropolitan areas and avoid the ravages of disease, bad sanitation and child labor. To go on thinking in these terms is anachronistic. Our difficulty today is rather how to contain people in metropolitan areas and avoid the ravages of apathetic and helpless neighborhoods.”

— Jane Jacobs

93. “It is futile to plan a city’s appearance, or speculate on how to endow it with a pleasing appearance of order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has. To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble.”

— Jane Jacobs

94. “No other expertise can substitute for locality knowledge in planning, whether the planning is creative, coordinating or predictive.”

— Jane Jacobs

95. “Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government.”

— Jane Jacobs

96. “Cities are not ordained; they are wholly existential. To say that a city grew “because” it was located at a good site for trading is, in view of what we can see in the real world, absurd. Few resources in this world are more common than good sites for trading but most of the settlements that form at these good sites do not become cities.”

— Jane Jacobs