145 Quotes by Jane Jacobs

It has long been recognized that getting an education is effective for bettering oneself and one’s chances in the world. But a degree and an education are not necessarily synonymous.

Some who are fortunate enough to have communities still do fight to keep them, but they have seldom prevailed. While people possess a community, they usually understand that they can’t afford to lose it; but after it is lost, gradually even the memory of what was lost is lost.

A border – the perimeter of a single massive or stretched-out use of territory – forms the edge of an area of ‘ordinary’ city. Often borders are thought of as passive objects, or matter-of-factly just as edges. However, a border exerts an active influence.

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.

Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, ‘neighborhood’ is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.

If the neighborhood were to lose the industries, it would be a disaster for us residents. Many enterprises, unable to exist on residential trade by itself, would disappear. Or if the industries were to lose us residents, enterprises unable to exist on the working people by themselves would disappear.

In small settlements everyone knows your affairs. In the city everyone does not – only those you choose to tell will know much about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people, whether their incomes are high or their incomes are low, whether they are white or colored, whether they are old inhabitants or new, and it is a gift of great-city life deeply cherished and jealously guarded.

There are only two ultimate public powers in shaping and running American cities: votes and control of the money.

Privately run jails are a mark of American “reinvented government” that has been picked up by neoconcervatives in Canada.