Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

Image
I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
Jane Jacobs
Image
I think that intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
Jane Jacobs
Image
There is no new world that you make without the old world.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
The notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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
Image
We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
Jane Jacobs
Image
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.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
Jane Jacobs
Image
Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
Jane Jacobs