Jane Jacobs
Design is people.Collection: Design
Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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.
The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.
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.
Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.Collection: Cities
Designing a dream city is easy; rebuilding a living one takes imagination.Collection: Dream
Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.Collection: Cities
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.Collection: Cities
Cities need old buildings so badly it is probably impossible for vigorous streets and districts to grow without them.... for really new ideas of any kind--no matter how ultimately profitable or otherwise successful some of them might prove to be--there is no leeway for such chancy trial, error and experimentation in the high-overhead economy of new construction. Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.Collection: Business
While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.Collection: Thinking
There is no new world that you make without the old world.Collection: World
Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Cities
The first fundamental of successful city life: People must take a modicum of responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other. This is a lesson no one learns by being told. It is learned from the experience of having other people without ties of kinship or close friendship or formal responsibility to you take a modicum of responsibility for you.Collection: Responsibility
This is something everyone knows: A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be unsafe.Collection: Cities
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.Collection: Cities
That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.Collection: Order
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.Collection: Small Changes
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.Collection: Cities
Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.Collection: Cities
Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.Collection: Cities
Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.Collection: Errors
Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.Collection: People
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 of attempting to substitute art for life. The results of such profound confusion between art and life are neither life nor art. They are taxidermy.Collection: Art
People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.Collection: Responsibility
Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes.Collection: Together
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.Collection: Cities
New ideas must use old buildingsCollection: Ideas
Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?Collection: Erosion
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.Collection: Dream
I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.Collection: Thinking
I was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.Collection: Grateful
People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.Collection: People
You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.Collection: People
Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.Collection: Community
There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.Collection: Nature
Does anyone suppose that, in real life, answers to any of the great questions that worry us today are going to come out of homogeneous settlements?Collection: Real
[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.Collection: Cities
The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.Collection: Mean
The second mode to deal with unsafe cities is to take refuge in vehicles. This is the technique practiced in the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge. It is also the technique practiced in Los Angeles.Collection: Animal
To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.Collection: Awe And Wonder
Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation.Collection: Unity
But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.Collection: Cities
One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.Collection: Students
The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.Collection: Thinking
There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.Collection: Clever
Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.Collection: Indispensable
Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.Collection: Taken
As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.Collection: Cities