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

Jane Jacobs

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Jane Jacobs
Age: 89 †
Born: 1916
Born: May 4
Died: 2006
Died: April 25
Author
Economist
Journalist
Sociologist
Urban Planner
Writer
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Jane Butzner
Jane Butzner Jacobs
Almost
Success
Seems
Imitate
Neurotic
Ignore
Planning
Determination
Failure

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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Empires want [cities] only to trade with the empire, which doesn't help them at all. It's just a way of exploiting them.
Jane Jacobs
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The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
Jane Jacobs
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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