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One of our troubles is that we try to make municipalities that are totally different from each other all act as if they were the same kind of creature, with the same kinds of possibilities.

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
Make
Totally
Kinds
Creatures
Possibility
Municipalities
Trouble
Municipality
Different
Troubles
Trying
Creature
Kind
Possibilities

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As in the pseudoscience of bloodletting, just so in the pseudoscience of city rebuilding and planning, years of learning and a plethora of subtle and complicated dogma have arisen on a foundation of nonsense.
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Never underestimate the power of a city to regenerate.
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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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Throughout the world Dark Ages have scrawled finis to successions of cultures receding far into the past.
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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.
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Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best most responsibly and responsively when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses. Fiscal accountability is the principle that institutions collecting and disbursing taxes work most responsibly when they are transparent to those providing the money.
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People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.
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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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...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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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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Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
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All my life I have been hearing that the oil was going to run out. It never happens. They keep discovering new oil fields. The world is apparently floating in oil fields.
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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 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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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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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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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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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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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.
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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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