Quote

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
Everyone
Attributes
Tell
Affairs
Doe
Precious
People
Affair
City
Choose
Cities
Settlements
Small
Settlement

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Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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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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New ideas often need old buildings.
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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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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.
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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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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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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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It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.
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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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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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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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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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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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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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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 intelligent people to a great extent are captives of their time or place.
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