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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
Erosion
Automobile
Cities
Attrition
Automobiles

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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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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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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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The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.
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The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don't even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.
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Cities never flourish alone. They have to be trading with other cities. My new hypothesis shows why. But also in trading with each other they can't be in too different stages of development, and they can't copy one another.
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The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity.
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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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Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
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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.
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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.
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You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
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The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
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Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.
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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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Some of the large [municipalities] in Quebec can contain within them most of the answers to their own practical problems. And so lots of different possibilities for doing things in a practical and different way become available.
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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
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Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best most responsibly and responsively when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.
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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.
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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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