Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs OC OOntwas an American-Canadian journalist, author, and activist best known for her influence on urban studies. Her influential book The Death and Life of Great American Citiesargued that urban renewal did not respect the needs of most city-dwellers. The book also introduced sociological concepts such as "eyes on the street" and "social capital"...
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth4 May 1916
CityScranton, PA
Jane Jacobs quotes about
unity moderation good-things
Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.
reality development economic
observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.
taken cities people
Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.
cities numbers diversity
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.
cities ideas people
All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.
regret years smell
Neighborhoods built up all at once change little physically over the years as a rule...[Residents] regret that the neighborhood has changed. Yet the fact is, physically it has changed remarkably little. People's feelings about it, rather, have changed. The neighborhood shows a strange inability to update itself, enliven itself, repair itself, or to be sought after, out of choice, by a new generation. It is dead. Actually it was dead from birth, but nobody noticed this much until the corpse began to smell.
community drug tvs
Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
cities support pieces
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
cities giving diversity
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.
cities safe city-streets
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.
cities needs dull
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.
dream cities tuberculosis
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.
cities choices multiplicity
The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.
responsibility ties people
People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.