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
dark past age
Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
fashion men intellectual
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.
sentimentality
Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
presentation
The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
running jail government
Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
mean improvement feedback
Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole
past foxes culture
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.
women effort repetition
Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
nuclear foundation trouble
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.
grateful independent people
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.
animal cities car
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.
military government irrelevance
Nations are political and military entities, and so are blocs of nations. But it doesn't necessarily follow from this that they are also the basic, salient entities of economic life or that they are particularly useful for probing the mysteries of economic structure, the reasons for rise and decline of wealth. Indeed, the failure of national governments and blocs of nations to force economic life to do their bidding suggests some sort of essential irrelevance.
life art order
Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence.
dream cities people
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.