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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
Last
Area
Found
Larger
Problem
Solution
Solutions
Areas
Whose
Safely
Problems
Region
Lasts
Regions

More quotes by 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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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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Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.
Jane Jacobs
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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
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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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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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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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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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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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
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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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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
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
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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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
Jane Jacobs
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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
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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Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
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