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[ René Lévesque] didn't understand why things do collapse. It's usually a very banal reason why things do collapse. It's not a grand reason, why they collapse economically, at least in the West.

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
Grand
West
Usually
Least
Understand
Didn
Banal
Reason
Economically
Things
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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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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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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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There is no new world that you make without the old world.
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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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observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.
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.
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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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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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Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
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Backward cities, or younger cities, or newly forming cities in supply regions, have to develop to a great extent on one another's shoulders. This is one of the terrible things about empires.
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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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This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
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
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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 was so grateful to be independent of the academic establishment. I thought, how awful it would be to have my future hinge on such people and such decisions.
Jane Jacobs
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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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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
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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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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