Quote

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

Jane Jacobs

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Use
History
Ideas
Sometimes
Must
Buildings
Building

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

Image
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
Jane Jacobs
Image
I get absolutely ruthless in my own way about not doing anything else when I am trying to concentrate on writing a book. I have to stick to it and concentrate.
Jane Jacobs
Image
There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.
Jane Jacobs
Image
...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
Image
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
Image
Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Lots of things are not possible for municipalities, suburbs, or collections of them now. They are not possible and they would become possible, because they would have more authority. They would have the same authority as a province now.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is no new world that you make without the old world.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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