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Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

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
Organs
Vital
Main
Places
City
Streets
Cities
Sidewalks
Public
Sidewalk

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In our American cities, we need all kinds of diversity.
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There were lots of programs over the course of the two referendums and the general tenor of them was that if Quebec were to separate, then Canada would disintegrate.
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Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
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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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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
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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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Expanding the Toronto Island Airport will undermine the downtown's economy and liveability and intensify pollution and smog from Oshawa to Oakville. I urge Torontonians to close down this dangerous Trojan horse and get on with planning constructive and delightful ways of using our magnificent lakeside assets.
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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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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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Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.
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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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Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.
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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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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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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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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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Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
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Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
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There are dangers in sentimentalizing nature. Most sentimental ideas imply, at bottom, a deep if unacknowledged disrespect. It is no accident that we Americans, probably the world's champion sentimentalizers about nature, are at one and the same time probably the world's most voracious and disrespectful destroyers of wild and rural countryside.
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