Jane Jacobs Quotes

New ideas must use old buildings.

Old ideas can sometimes use new buildings. New ideas must use old buildings.

You can’t rely on bringing people downtown, you have to put them there.

By the end of the book, it is quite different than the way you thought it would be when you started the book – both in form and what it contains and what you think. Well, you tipped in a lot and you digested a lot – it wasn’t pre-digested in your view. And it changed what you thought and how you see things.

Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.

Intricate minglings of different uses in cities are not a form of chaos. On the contrary, they represent a complex and highly developed form of order.

While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.

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.

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.

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.

I basically don’t think that the way we do things is that dependent on one resource, such as oil. There can be different kinds of engines for cars. I think that solar heating, wind heating can substitute for a lot of uses for oil. I’d like to see those things happen because they are more sustainable in any case. But I do not think that running out of oil is not going to bother us that much. I think we have got to be rescued by something or we really are going down a slippery slope.

The best thing is not to think about [separatism]. [People in Alberta] don’t even want to engage in talking pros and cons and why people feel this way.