Quote

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.

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
Clear
Answer
Automobile
Indisputable
Purpose
Mystery
Purposes
Millennia
America
Failing
Established
Automobiles
Need
Produce
Practicals
Ponder
Needs
Cases
Practical
Erosion
Men
Cities
Hardly
Pondering
Life
Answers
Fail
Troubled
Stop
Case
Consume

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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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.
Jane Jacobs
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Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
Jane Jacobs
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I think that may be the biggest difference between Americans and people elsewhere. Unlike Americans, Canadians know that there are places just as real as Canada. It's a self-centeredness that's a very strange thing.
Jane Jacobs
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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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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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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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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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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...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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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.
Jane Jacobs
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There are fashions in building. Behind the fashions lie economic and technological reasons, and these fashions exclude all but a few genuinely different possibilities in city dwelling construction at any one time.
Jane Jacobs
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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs
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I think that things are going to change just because people get too damn bored with what they have.
Jane Jacobs
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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.
Jane Jacobs