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

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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 best part of a Reg Hartt presentation is what he has to say.
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I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.
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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.
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Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.
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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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Unfortunately [René] Lévesque had so little self confidence in Quebec and in the people themselves, that he fell for that and, yes, he'd say, you know, it might be ruinous for us economically.
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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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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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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Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
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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 notion that you could discard the old world and now make a new one. This is what was so bad about Modernism.
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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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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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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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While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.
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[If Quebec became sovereign] there would be one level of government that would be missing, one less level of government. The municipality would become the second level.
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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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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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