Quotes by Jane Jacobs

“Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural design...”

“As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirtin...”

“To approach a city, or even a city neighborhood, as if it were a larger architectural problem, capable of being given order by converting it into a disciplined work of art, is to make the mistake o...”

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

“What is more dramatic, even romantic, than the tumbled towers of lower Manhattan, rising suddenly to the clouds like a magic castle girdled by water? Its very touch of jumbled jaggedness, its tower...”

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

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

“We expect too much of new buildings, and too little of ourselves.”

“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 traditio...”

“Design is people.”

“Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a comple...”

“[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typ...”

“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 d...”

“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 ...”

“No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through ...”

“To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one p...”

“I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the ...”

“In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the big 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...”

“In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the big 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 ...”