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There is no new world that you make without the old world.

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
World
Without
Make

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Traffic congestion is caused by vehicles, not by people in themselves.
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People who try to predict the future by extrapolating in a line of more of what exists - they are always wrong.
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To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.
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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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To seek causes of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
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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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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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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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observation of realities has never, to put it mildly, been one of the strengths of economic development theory.
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This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
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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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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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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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[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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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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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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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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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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Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
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