Jane Jacobs Quotes

New York is the perfect model of a city, not the model of a perfect city.

Cities are immortal.

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.

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

The great city is the best organ of memory man has yet created.

Tower'd cities please us then, And the busy hum of men.

In New York, the impact of these concentrated superskyscrapers on street scale and sunlight, on the city's aniquated support systems, circulation, and infrastructure, on its already tenuous livability, overrides any aesthetic. ... Art becomes worthless in a city brutalized by overdevelopment.

I say we don't need art in nature, because it's so perfect without us. We need it in the cities. But the cities have absolutely lost their own center. They think having ten cars and a big bridge is the way to happiness. It's not.

Infrastructure creates the form of a city and enables life to go on in a city, in a certain way.

The city is the nerve center of our civilization. It is also the storm center.

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

A culture, we all know, is made by its cities.

A city is like a family portrait - you don't tear it up if you don't like your uncle's nose.

Mixed use is what cities are all about. If you don't have mixed use, you don't have cities.

New York City has always had more in common with Paris or London than with Cincinnati.

Good and bad make up a city.

Street lights, dog-doo and parking meters are not my cup of tea.

I actually grew up in the City of Pasadena.

In terms of the most unique thing we do socially, my vote goes to something we invented alongside cities - we have lots of anonymous interactions and interactions with strangers. That has shaped us enormously.

A tranquil city of good laws, fine architecture, and clean streets is like a classroom of obedient dullards, or a field of gelded bulls - whereas a city of anarchy is a city of promise.

The modern city consists of...dark, narrow streets full of gasoline fumes, coal dust, and toxic gasses, torn by the noise.

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

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Because this is so, there is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: a city cannot be a work of art.

Hot weather opens the skull of a city, exposing its white brain, and its heart of nerves, which sizzle like the wires inside a lightbulb. And there exudes a sour extra-human smell that makes the very stone seem flesh-alive, webbed and pulsing.

All urbanization, pushed beyond a certain point, automatically becomes suburbanization.... Every great city is just a collection of suburbs. Its inhabitantsdo not live in their city; they merely inhabit it.