Jane Jacobs

Jane Jacobs was an American-born Canadian urbanist, writer and activist. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States.

Sourced

• 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, 30

• 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, 7f (explanation)

• A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
  • The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 410.