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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.

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
Cities
Help
Helping
Doesn
Way
Exploiting
Empire
Empires
Trade

More quotes by Jane Jacobs

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The primary conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.
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Power is supposed to be so corrupt. I don't think it's so much corrupt, in the usual sense of the word, as stupid and unrealistic. The more power a person has, the further he gets from reality.
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The entrepreneurial investors of the time just want to repeat themselves indefinitely and don't know when to stop. You can't do that. And so finally the housing boom, or the auto boom, or whatever it is that's been carrying things along, runs out of customers.
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In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not-only those you choose to tell will know about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.
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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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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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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.
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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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People who think of themselves as exiles, I find, can never really put their lives together, really.
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Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.
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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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You don't get new products and services out of sameness.
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Sentimentality about nature denatures everything it touches.
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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Almost nobody travels willingly from sameness to sameness and repetition to repetition, even if the physical effort required is trivial.
Jane Jacobs
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Americans don't really think that other places are as real as America.
Jane Jacobs
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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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This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
Jane Jacobs
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Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
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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.
Jane Jacobs