Jane Jacobs Quotes

In great cities, spaces as well as places are designed and built: walking, witnessing, being in public, are as much part of the design and purpose as is being inside to eat, sleep, make shoes or love or music. The word citizen has to do with cities, and the ideal city is organized around citizenship -- around participation in public life.

The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.

A city like London is sociable in a sense that there are people gathering in bars and restaurants, concerts and lectures. Yet you can partake of all these experiences and never say hello to anyone new. And one of the things that all religions do is take groups of strangers into a space and say it is OK to talk to each other.

Cities are the crucible of civilization.

We are in danger of making our cities places where business goes on, but where life, in its real sense, is lost.

I don't want to sound like some old person pining for how things used to be, because I'm not. But walking down the street, for example, used to be a public activity; you'd see the other people.

That the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seem to find incomprehensible. They operate on the premise that city people seek the sight of emptiness, obvious order and quiet. Nothing could be less true. The presences of great numbers of people gathered together in cities should not only be frankly accepted as a physical fact... they should also be enjoyed as an asset and their presence celebrated.

[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.

I don't think the Internet has replaced cities in any significant way, nor really could it. Cities are dynamic - and deeply seductive for the people who flock there - because they broker all sorts of fantastic and useful connections, cultural and economic and social.

That is the effect of my sculptures in the public domain: people are making contact with each other again.

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

The cities are the principal home and seat of the human group. They are the coral colony for Man, the collective being.

Good and bad make up a city.

Parks and public space are … important to a democratic society because they are the only places where people meet as equals.

We have stopped making communities in which people want to live and are making communities where people drive through.

If, instead of hiring half-baked revolutionary planners to fill our college undergraduates with ingenious schemes to disperse populations, split up big cities into little ones, go underground or into distant places to escape bombs and congestion, abandon large urban areas in favor of roadside villages, we were to publish reliable, simply written, common-sense information to control the building boom, what a country this would be!

All it takes is an understanding that humans, not buildings come first when designing a city.

When Barcelona came out of the Franco dictatorship in 1975, the first thing city officials did was to make 200 public squares where people could meet and talk to each other as a sign that democracy had returned.

Buses and subways are this remarkable social club. You talk to people you wouldn't normally talk to.

Look, I'm 41 with a six-year-old son, and even though I live in a building with a million kids, he doesn't have one friend there because there's no context for making that happen. I think there's a huge market for a connected building where I could broadcast to other parents that I want to set up a playdate for my child.

Some communities are formed through schools, churches, workplaces. But much of how we learn about one another as a society comes from physically being together in places like skating rinks.

The times in my life I've felt the most alive is when I'm having a connection with people. We need to hack cities in a way to bring back that community culture.

People make a city, it's not the other way round.

A lot of cities are making a real effort, neighborhood by neighborhood, to make themselves into a place where life can be pretty good.

My first decade of living in a metropolis was like, I was a people watcher. It meant the world to me to talk to strangers. I got excited about the fifth time I'd see the same person in the same bodega. I loved getting to know a certain clerk or barista. It took on a whole big meaning for me because of that atomization that suburban people do start to feel.