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Lowly, unpurposeful and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow.

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
Grows
Sidewalk
Public
Random
Small
Appear
Change
Contact
Life
City
Grow
Wealth
Contacts
Cities
Lowly

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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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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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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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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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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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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.
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Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.
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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.
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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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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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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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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.
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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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I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
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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.
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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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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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You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
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New ideas often need old buildings.
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