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A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.

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
Found
Larger
Problem
Solution
Solutions
Areas
Whose
Safely
Problems
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Lasts
Regions
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More quotes by 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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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
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.
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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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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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
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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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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
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In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
Jane Jacobs
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
Jane Jacobs
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...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
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[If Quebec became sovereign] there would be one level of government that would be missing, one less level of government. The municipality would become the second level.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
Jane Jacobs
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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
Jane Jacobs
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Unfortunately [René] Lévesque had so little self confidence in Quebec and in the people themselves, that he fell for that and, yes, he'd say, you know, it might be ruinous for us economically.
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