Quotes from Jane Jacobs

Park uses like these should be brought right up to the borders of big parks, and designed as links between the park and its bordering street. They can belong to the world of the street and, on their other side, to the world of the park, and be charming in their double

Conformity and monotony, even when they are embellished with a froth of novelty, are not attributes of developing and economically vigorous cities. They are attributes of stagnant settlements.

The only way, I think, to combat vacuums in these cases is to rely on extraordinarily strong counterforces close by. This means that population concentration ought to be made deliberately high (and diverse) near borders, that blocks close to borders should be especially short and potential street use extremely fluid, and that mixtures of primary uses should be abundant; so should mixtures in age of buildings

Artificial symptoms of prosperity or a "good image" do not revitalize a city, but only explicit economic growth processes for which there are no substitutes.

Similarly, a few thousand workers dribbled in among tens or hundreds of thousands of residents make no appreciable balance either in sum or at any particular spot of any significance

Considering the hazard of monotony…the most serious fault in our zoning laws lies in the fact that they permit an entire area to be devoted to a single use.

In city downtowns, public policy cannot inject directly the entirely private enterprises that serve people after work and enliven and help invigorate the place. Nor can public policy, by any sort of fiat, hold these uses in a downtown. But indirectly, public policy can encourage their growth by using its own chessmen, and those susceptible to public pressure, in the right places as primers.

This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers.

No special form of city blight is nearly so devastating as the Great Blight of Dullness.

But we also need, among other things, to abandon conventional planning ideas about city neighborhoods. The 'ideal' neighborhood of planning and zoning theory, too large in scale to possess any competence or meaning as a street neighborhood, is at the same time too small in scale to operate as a district. It is unfit for anything. It will not serve as even a point of departure. Like the belief in medical bloodletting, it was a wrong turn in the search for understanding.

That such wonders may be accomplished, people who get marked with the planners' hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power.

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.

To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble.

This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them.

Antras b?das yra sl?ptis transporto priemon?se. Taip daroma stambi?j? gyv?n? rezervatuose Afrikoje, kur turistai ?sp?jami nieku gyvu neišlipti iš mašin?, kol nepasieks viešbu?io. Taip pat elgiamasi ir Los Andžele.

Zoners, highway planners, legislators, land-use planners, and parks and playground planners—none of whom live in an ideological vacuum—constantly use, as fixed points of reference, these two powerful visions and the more sophisticated merged vision.

Vidudienio baleto dažniausiai nematau, nes jam iš dalies ir b?dinga tai, kad ?ia gyvenantys dirbantieji, kaip aš, išeina atlikti prašalai?i? vaidmens ant kit? šaligatvi?.

Somehow, when the fair became part of the city, it did not work like the fair.

A city park in this fix, afflicted (for in such cases it is an affliction) with a good-sized terrain, is figuratively in the same position as a large store in a bad economic location.

The idea of sorting out certain cultural or public functions and decontaminating their relationship with the workaday city dovetailed nicely with the Garden City teachings.

No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.

Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.

The safety of the street works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of hostility or suspicion precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing.

No good for cities or for their design, planning, economics or people, can come of the emotional assumption that dense city populations are, per se, undesirable.