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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.

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
Art
Complexes
Cannot
Complex
Done
Intense
Work
Basic
Life
City
Deal
Esthetic
Deals
Limitation
Cities
Dealing

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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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Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.
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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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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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It may be romantic to search for the salves of society's ills in slow-moving rustic surroundings, or among innocent, unspoiled provincials, if such exist, but it is a waste of time.
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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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Nothing is so clear in history that is it happens for any one thing. It seems that a lot of things come together to make great changes.
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Erosion of cities or attrition of automobiles?
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We expect too much of new # buildings , and too little of ourselves.
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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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I still have a lot of family in America. I still have a lot of friends there. There is a lot that I admire there very much. When I find America getting too much criticized outside America, I want to tell them how many things are good about it.
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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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One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.
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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.
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There are still an awful lot of intelligent, clever constructive Americans and they are still doing clever constructive things.
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When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.
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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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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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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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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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