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Jane Jacobs Quotes

1916–2006 United States

Jane Jacobs (4 May 1916 – 25 April 2006) was an American-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist, most famous as author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. In 1968, Jacobs moved to Toronto, where she lived until her death.

United States
Activists
Authors
Economists
Journalists

Also known as: The Death And Life of Great American Cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

Random Jane Jacobs quote

24 quotes

The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost?

Dark Age Ahead (2004)

Great cities are not like towns, only larger. They are not like suburbs, only denser. They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of them is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

It may be that we have become so feckless as a people that we no longer care how things do work, but only what kind of quick, easy outer impression they give. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

I was taught that the American's right to be a free individual, not at the mercy of the state, was hard-won and that its price was eternal vigilance, that I too would have to be vigilant.

Political questionnaire response (1952)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Jane Jacobs (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.