Quotes from Jane Jacobs

My guess was that the jobs were being added specifically in the GTA

Cities are full of people with whom, from your viewpoint, or mine, or any other individual's, a certain degree of contact is useful or enjoyable; but you do not want them in your hair. And they do not want you in theirs either.

The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.

Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.

Naturally, in time, forceful and able men, admired administrators, having swallowed the initial fallacies and having been provisioned with tools and with public confidence, go on logically to the greatest destructive excesses, which prudence or mercy might previously have forbade.

I for one do not wish the oil companies well-or rather, I do not wish well their function of providing oil for fuel. I hope that particular function shrivels, dwindles, and ebbs.

They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

Jacobs never relished the role of prophet, but at the end of her life she hazarded two related but opposite guesses. One path was what she called, in Dark Age Ahead, "cultural collapse." Jacobs found evidence of imminent decline in the erosion of family, community, science, education, governance, and professional integrity in North America.

where large organizations are relied upon for economic expansion and development—that is, where small organizations find little opportunity to multiply, to find financing, and to add new work to old—the economy inevitably stagnates.

Adding and Dividing Work Ancient people seem to have understood perfectly well that economic life is a matter of adding new goods and services. But instead of seeing the logic and order by which this happens, they saw magic. Important activities had been given to men or taught to men in remote times by gods; they had been stolen from gods; they had been brought along, like a trousseau, by demigod progenitors of people.

You've got to get out and walk. Walk, and you will see that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong. You will see, for example, that a worthy and well-kept institutional center does not necessarily upgrade its surroundings.

he thought of development as a collection of things for producing, not as a process of change. The process itself was something he could not buy, nor Western Europe sell.

most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action.

Zoning for diversity must be thought of differently from the usual zoning for conformity, but like all zoning it is suppressive. One form of zoning for diversity is already familiar in certain city districts: controls against demolition of historically valuable buildings.

A park being surrounded by intensive duplications of tall offices or apartments might well be zoned for lower buildings along its south side in particular, thus accomplishing two useful purposes at one stroke: protecting the park's supply of winter sun, and protecting indirectly, to some extent at least, its diversity of surrounding uses.

The way to raise the tax base of a city is not at all to exploit to the limit the short-term tax potential of every site. This undermines the long-term tax potential of whole neighborhoods.

Public and quasi-public bodies should establish their buildings and facilities at points where these will add effectively to diversity in the first place (rather than duplicate their neighbors).

Once upon a time the general problem of the City Chaotic looked so simple. Boulevards and civic monuments were going to create the City Beautiful. After that proved insufficient, regional plans were to create the City Sensible. These proved unacceptable and now we are struggling, sometimes it seems at the expense of everything else, to improvise the City Traversible.

If outstandingly successful city localities are to withstand the forces of self-destruction—and if the nuisance value of defense against self-destruction is to be an effective nuisance value—the sheer supply of diversified, lively, economically viable city localities must be increased

Life is an ad hoc affair. It has to be improvised all the time because of the hard fact that everything we do changes what is. This is distressing to people who would like to see things beautifully planned out and settled once and for all. That cannot be.

A battle like this would be intolerable if we didn't have a good time, if we didn't have the joy of battle, if we didn't have a high old time in this fight. Never, never underestimate the power of high hearts when they're combined with principled, unyielding wills.

CONDITION 1: The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two. These must insure the presence of people who go outdoors on different schedules and are in the place for different purposes, but who are able to use many facilities in common.

Always idiosyncratic and unorthodox, often surprising, often willing to risk being wrong if it means reorienting stale conventional wisdom, she pushes beyond the familiar alarms to see urban transformation as a source of radical possibility and opportunity, not nostalgia and loss. More than a tribune of the ideal neighborhood, Jacobs was perhaps our greatest theorist of the city not as a modern machine for living but as a living human system, geared for solving its own problems.

Is it not possible for the economy of a city to be highly efficient, and for the city also to excel at the development of new goods and services? No, it seems not. The conditions that promote development and the conditions that promote efficient production and distribution of already existing goods and services are not only different, in most ways they are diametrically opposed