Quotes from Jane Jacobs

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.

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.

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

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

All through organized history, if you wanted prosperity you had to have cities. Cities are places that attract new people with new ideas.

Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.

Just the way in Europe, Paris, Copenhagen, and Stockholm, and Frankfurt, possibly and Berlin, certainly, all had important roles, because of independence. Because they were depending on themselves.

Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

Design is people.

Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.

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

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.

Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

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

Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.

You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

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.

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.

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.

The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)