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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.

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
Cities
Settlements
Small
Settlement
Everyone
Attributes
Tell
Affairs
Doe
Precious
People
Affair
City
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More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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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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I think it is fatal to specialize. And all kinds of things show us that and that the more diverse we are in what we can do, the better.
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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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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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Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
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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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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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A border--the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory--forms the edge of an area of 'ordinary' city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.
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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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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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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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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.
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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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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
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A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
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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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