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

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
Kind
Diversity
Kinds
Cities
American
Need
Needs

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(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
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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.
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A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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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.
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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.
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[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.
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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
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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.
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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.
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