Quotes About Jane Jacobs

It has been almost 50 years since American journalist and author Jane Jacobs published her seminal book The Death and Life of Great American Cities in 1961.1 She pointed out how the dramatic increase in car traffic and the urban planning ideology of modernism that separates the uses of the city and emphasizes free-standing individual buildings would put an end to urban space and city life and result in lifeless cities devoid of people.

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

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.