110+ Jane Jacobs Quotes On Cities, Urban And Activism

Jane Jacobs was an American-Canadian journalist, author, and activist who wrote extensively about urban planning and development. She is best known for her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which criticized the urban renewal policies of the 1950s and proposed a new approach to city building. Jacobs argued for a community-based approach to city planning that focused on local needs and the preservation of diversity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Jane Jacobs on cities, life, urban.

Top 10 Jane Jacobs Quotes

1. Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.
2. Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.
9. The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.
10. There is no new world that you make without the old world.

Jane Jacobs Image Quotes

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

Jane Jacobs Short Quotes

• You can't rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.
• New ideas must use old buildings
• Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
• Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
• Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
• Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
• Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
• New ideas often need old buildings.
• Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
• I am ambivalent about London because I am so ambivalent about England in general.

Jane Jacobs Quotes About Cities

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. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves. — Jane Jacobs

Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building. — Jane Jacobs

But look what we have built ... This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities. — Jane Jacobs

...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood. — Jane Jacobs

[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. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate. — Jane Jacobs

In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity. — Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs Quotes About Life

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense. — Jane Jacobs

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? — Jane Jacobs

I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically. — Jane Jacobs

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art. — Jane Jacobs

It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time. — Jane Jacobs

All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields. — Jane Jacobs

People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really. — Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs Famous Quotes And Sayings

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. — Jane Jacobs

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

it is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end. — Jane Jacobs

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. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity. — Jane Jacobs

poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes. Analogically, heat is a result of active processes; it has causes. But cold is not the result of any processes; it is only the absence of heat. Just so, the great cold of poverty and economic stagnation is merely the absence of economic development. — Jane Jacobs

By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best most responsibly and responsively when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money. — Jane Jacobs

What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? ... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia. What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable. The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles. — Jane Jacobs

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

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. — Jane Jacobs

In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people. — Jane Jacobs

Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial. — Jane Jacobs

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things work but only the kind of quick, easy outer impression that they get. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Expanding the Toronto Island Airport will undermine the downtown's economy and liveability and intensify pollution and smog from Oshawa to Oakville. I urge Torontonians to close down this dangerous Trojan horse and get on with planning constructive and delightful ways of using our magnificent lakeside assets. — Jane Jacobs

A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence. — Jane Jacobs

Why did I become a Canadian citizen? Not because I was rejecting being a U.S. citizen. At the time when I became a Canadian citizen, you couldn't be a dual citizen. Now you can. So I had to be one or the other. But the reason I became a Canadian citizen was because it simply seemed so abnormal to me not to be able to vote. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities. — Jane Jacobs

The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost? — Jane Jacobs

Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities. — Jane Jacobs

Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches. — Jane Jacobs

I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing. — Jane Jacobs

Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality. — Jane Jacobs

While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble. — Jane Jacobs

Innovating economies expand and develop. Economies that do not add new kinds of goods and services, but continue only to repeat old work, do not expand much nor do they, by definition, develop. — Jane Jacobs

We've got a [Canadian] prime minister who seems to be intent on destroying our health system and education system. But I have gotten a thicker skin. I can get angry about these things without feeling like vomiting, if you know what I mean. — Jane Jacobs

I think that part of the growing popularity of the New Urbanism is not simply because it is so rational, and not simply because people care so much about community or even understand it, or the relation of sprawl to the ruination of the natural world. But they just don't like what is around. And they will be ruthless with it. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

You don't get new products and services out of sameness. — Jane Jacobs

People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong. — Jane Jacobs

Design is people. — Jane Jacobs

There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things. — Jane Jacobs

(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.) — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Maybe part of my animus against the English is the way they have always treated the Irish and they way they still think about the Irish. — Jane Jacobs

The notion - and I tell you this one even worries me that it extends into New Urbanism - the notion of the shopping center [as] a valid kind of downtown. That's taken over. It's very hard for architects of this generation even to think in terms of a downtown or a center that is owned by all different people, with different ideas. — Jane Jacobs

The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism. — Jane Jacobs

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

I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have. — Jane Jacobs

You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use. — Jane Jacobs

City diversity represents accident and chaos. — Jane Jacobs

observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory. — Jane Jacobs

It is hopeless to try to convert some borders into seams. — Jane Jacobs

My mother used to say when we were children, 'When a boy gets a stick in his hand, his brains run out the other end of it.' Power is a stick in the hand, and I have never heard of anybody who wielded a very big stick of power whose brains did not run out the other end. As a nation, our brains are running out the other end of our power right now. — Jane Jacobs

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

Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure. — Jane Jacobs

We expect too much of new #‎ buildings , and too little of ourselves. — Jane Jacobs

Unity, like so many good things, is good only in moderation. — Jane Jacobs

Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada. — Jane Jacobs

In trading with each other cities can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another. Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires. Empires want them only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them. — Jane Jacobs

There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time. — Jane Jacobs

I still have a lot of family in America. I still have a lot of friends there. There is a lot that I admire there very much. When I find America getting too much criticized outside America, I want to tell them how many things are good about it. — Jane Jacobs

Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole — Jane Jacobs

The Japanese are virtuosos. They make just the little accent that makes all the difference. So much there is so beautiful - just a shop window display is a work of art. Just the way they make all kinds of things out of bamboo that are so ingenious. Just the way this little bamboo drain or latch is so beautiful. The masonry around the streams to hold the bank are beautiful - and not all one kind and not just cement. — Jane Jacobs

I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place. — Jane Jacobs

I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details. — Jane Jacobs

Artists, whatever their medium, make selections from the abounding materials of life, and organize these selections into works that are under the control of the artist.... In relation to the inclusiveness and literally endless intricacy of life, art is arbitrary, symbolic and abstracted. That is its value and the source of its own kind of order and coherence. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America. — Jane Jacobs

The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say. — Jane Jacobs

I am not any hate-America person. I really came here for positive reasons. — Jane Jacobs

The entrepreneurial investors of the time just want to repeat themselves indefinitely and don't know when to stop. You can't do that. And so finally the housing boom, or the auto boom, or whatever it is that's been carrying things along, runs out of customers. — Jane Jacobs

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. — Jane Jacobs

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

Life Lessons by Jane Jacobs

1. Jane Jacobs taught that cities should be designed with people in mind, not cars, and that diverse, vibrant communities are essential for a healthy urban environment.
2. She also believed that cities should be planned to accommodate the needs of all citizens, not just the wealthy and powerful.
3. Finally, Jacobs argued that cities should be viewed as living organisms, with their own unique culture and history, and not as machines that can be engineered to perfection.