Jane Jacobs Quotes

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

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

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

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.

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.

There is no new world that you make without the old world.

While you are looking, you might as well also listen, linger and think about what you see.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.

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.

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.

New ideas must use old buildings

Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.

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.

People must take a modicum of public responsibility for each other even if they have no ties to each other.

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

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.