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.
too-much littles building
We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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.
cities erosion attrition
Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
thinking cities giving
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.