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The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

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
City
Cities
Place
Improvisations
Good
Replete
Always
Sidewalk
Never
Improvisation
Ballet
Repeats

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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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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People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.
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You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
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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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New ideas often need old buildings.
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The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.
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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.
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The best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
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Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
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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.
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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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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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Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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Reactions [on my 1979 Massey lectures] were from Anglophones. I'm one. But I'm terrible at French. In fact, there was practically no reaction.
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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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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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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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I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.
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Lots of things are not possible for municipalities, suburbs, or collections of them now. They are not possible and they would become possible, because they would have more authority. They would have the same authority as a province now.
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