Jane Jacobs Quotes

But look what we have built low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace. Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums. Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.

I remember Detroit feeling really unsafe, feeling scared a lot. Our house was broken into, our car was stolen, we had to get a watchdog, we would get beat up in the street, I had my bike stolen. There was just a lot of real anarchy on the streets and sidewalks.

… the greatest act of civic vandalism in New York’s history.

Atlanta is totally destroyed. I don’t think that people will live there any more.

Look what we have built ... low-income projects that became worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.

Lagos was a city that had been turned against itself. There was a bridge that became the perfect trap for crimes, which began with nails being scattered to cause flat tyres. If the driver stopped, the car would be dismantled in 20 minutes and the parts thrown overboard [to people waiting below]. The system had turned into a kind of destructive device that could be used against people. That was the narrative.

The most dangerous savages live in cities.

Maybe New York shouldn't survive. Maybe it should go through a cycle of destruction.

I cannot watch the city of Chicago be destroyed by petty politics and bad government.

I must refuse to believe that the Germans contemplate with equanimity the evacuation of cities like London for fear of destruction to be wrought by man's inhuman ingenuity.

(The city is being) destroyed by thugs who in a very senseless way are trying to tear down what so many have fought for, tearing down businesses, tearing down or destroying property, things that we know will impact our community for years.

Environmental damage such as graffiti, fly-posting and general littering is a menace that is becoming all too prevalent, not just in inner cities but in many communities - urban and rural.

Until the first blow fell, no one was convinced that Penn Station really would be demolished, or that New York would permit this monumental act of vandalism against one of the largest and finest landmarks of its age of Roman elegance. Any city gets what it admires, will pay for, and, ultimately, deserves. Even when we had Penn Station, we couldn’t afford to keep it clean. We want and deserve tin-can architecture in a tinhorn culture. And we will probably be judged not by the monuments we build but by those we have destroyed

The right to have access to every building in the city by private motorcar in an age when everyone possesses such a vehicle is actually the right to destroy the city.

Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end.

I watched the mighty skyline fall

We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end. We are bombing Germany city by city and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for her to go in with the war. That is our object, and we shall pursue it relentlessly.

Obviously murder and graffiti are two vastly different crimes. But they are part of the same continuum, and a climate that tolerates one is more likely to tolerate the other.

That is the way to lay the city flat, To bring the roof to the foundation, And bury all, which yet distinctly ranges, In heaps and piles of ruin.

The big cities of America are becoming Third World countries.

Well, here you had a city that was selling more cars than ever before, that had this wondrous music being created, that was so vital to the labor and civil rights of this country, and yet it was dying and didn't see it, except for some sociologist at Wayne State University who predicted that Detroit was losing population by a half-million by the end of that '60s decade, and that that trend would continue taking away its tax base.

In New York City, the common bats fly only at twilight. Brick-bats fly at all hours.

Twenty-three stories up and all I could see out the windows was grey smog. They could call it the City of the Angels if they wanted to, but if there were angels out there, they had to be flying blind.