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Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.

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
Usually
Pasts
Realize
Relied
Realizing
Foxes
Point
Advanced
Culture
Guard
Past
Cultures
Enough
Sophisticated
Shouldn

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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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...frequent streets and short blocks are valuable because of the fabric of intricate cross-use that they permit among the users of a city neighbouhood.
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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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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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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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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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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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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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Privately run jails are a mark of American reinvented government that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.
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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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I don't think of the New Urbanism as an economic or political train wreck. I think of it as one of these great generational upheavals that's coming.
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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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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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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Jane Jacobs
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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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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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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
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When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.
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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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