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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?

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
Attrition
Automobiles
Erosion
Automobile
Cities

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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 think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
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What if we fail to stop the erosion of cities by automobiles? ... In that case America will hardly need to ponder a mystery that has troubled men for millennia. What is the purpose of life? For us, the answer will be clear, established and for all practical purposes indisputable. The purpose of life is to produce and consume automobiles.
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Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
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New ideas often need old buildings.
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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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A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.
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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.
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One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.
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I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better.
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Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
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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.
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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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[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.
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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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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.
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observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.
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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?
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Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
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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.
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