Jane Jacobs Quotes

When we deal with cities we are dealing with life at its most complex and intense. Planners are guided by principles derived from the behaviour and appearance of suburbs, tuberculosis sanatoria, fairs and imaginary dream cities - from anything but cities themselves.

Cities are never random. No matter how chaotic they might seem, everything about them grows out of a need to solve a problem

A city is a place that can offer maximum freedom. Otherwise it’s incomplete.

More than its utilitarian and technocratic transparency, it is the opaque ambivalence of its oddities that makes the city livable.

A city is not an accident but the result of coherent visions and aims.

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.

Cities are created by and for traffic.

Architecture is one of the art forms best able to improve and revitalise cities both artistically and functionally.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

City planning finds its validation in the intuitive recognition that a burgeoning market society can not be trusted to produce spontaneously a habitable, sanitary, or even efficient city, much less a beautiful one.

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

It is my plan to create a city that is direct and simple... To leave out all that is ugly, to eliminate the unnecessary, and to give Florida and the nation a resort city as perfect as study and ideals can make it.

New York is hard, cynical, ruthless, even beyond other cities. From their early repression its children emerge sophisticated, both stunted and overdeveloped, perverted, premature, forced by the artificiality of their environment.

There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.

Cities are an immense laboratory of trial and error, failure and success, in city building and city design.

Taken altogether, Washington as a city is most unsatisfactory, and falls more grievously short of the thing attempted than any other of the great undertakings of which I have seen anything in the United States.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

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

Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

[Cities] are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

The object of this edict is to enlighten the present and future citizens of Chandigarh about the basic concepts of planning of the city so that they become its guardians and save it from whims of individuals.

If we’re going to talk about transport, I would say that the great city is not the one that has highways, but one where a child on a tricycle or bicycle can go safely everywhere.

A city should be built to give its inhabitants security and happiness

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.

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