Jane Jacobs Quotes

The Settlement ... is an experimental effort to aid in the solution of the social and industrial problems which are engendered by the modern conditions of life in a great city. It insists that these problems are not confined to any one portion of the city. It is an attempt to relieve, at the same time, the overaccumulation at one end of society and the destitution at the other.

A city is a large community where people are lonesome together.

When 125,000 people are gathered together on 10 square miles of land they must of necessity give up certain of their liberties. It is a sacrifice they must make for the sake of the advantages of city life.

The city ... is involved in the fight for its life. One of the critical battlegrounds is the struggle to preserve middle class residential neighborhoods.

Living in N.Y.C. has truly awakened me to the New York elite and their penchant for the city's self-described brilliant public transit system. I think it sucks... just like public transit always does.

Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.

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.

What is the purpose of a city if not to grant the greatest of gifts, anonymity?

We cannot afford merely to sit down and deplore the evils of city life as inevitable, when cities are constantly growing, both absolutely and relatively. We must set ourselves vigorously about the task of improving them; and this task is now well begun.

The American city should be a collection of communities where every member has a right to belong. It should be a place where every man feels safe on his streets and in the house of his friends.

Population growth and the proliferation of mega-cities around the world redefines the entire global security agenda.

The city is not the problem; the city is the solution.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears.

We form cities in order to enhance interaction, to facilitate growth, wealth creation, ideas, innovation, but in so doing, we create from - from a physicist's viewpoint, entropy, meaning all of those bad things that we feel are engulfing us.

It would be a nice place if you took all the people out of the city.

[At] the end of the day, when we talk about cities, we talk about a gathering of people. And we cannot see that as a problem.

Walking through the city streets... Is it by mistake or design?

So this is where people come to live; I would have thought it is a city to die in.

It seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that there are an awful lot of people in Manhattan. And it's getting worse.

By far the greatest and most admirable form of wisdom is that needed to plan and beautify cities and human communities.

The more I observed Washington, the more frequently I visited it, and the more people I interviewed there, the more I understood how prophetic L'Enfant was when he laid it out as a city that goes around in circles.

Design does matter. And not necessarily in a way that people realize. A lot of what you do, people take for granted - that a park has always been here, that a bicycle lane has always been there, that the street is safe or clean.

The single most important thing a city can do is provide a community where interesting, smart people want to live with their families.

The populations of most cities around the world continue to grow. The reasonspeople congregate in cities are various and complex, and the dawn of the digital age has not put much of adamper on the human urge to congregate.

Most people are walking around the city like corpses; they aren't alive enough to notice the trash. They come from other places and they see it as a big garbage dump. Do you want to live and work in a garbage dump? I don't. That's partly because I grew up in the most pristine environment possible - Hawaii, where it is sacrilege to leave your garbage on the ground.