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My Husband Was A Hospital Architect And He Was Working On Some Hospitals In Alberta, And I Told Him To Try To Find Out What They Thought About Separatism. He Would Come Back On Weekends. He Said "well, I Think I Found Out How They Feel About Separatism. I Brought It Up At Lunch In The Cafeteria, And Everybody At The Table Was Silent And Then Somebody Said 'let's Change The Subject'."

-Jane Jacobs

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My Husband Was A

Jane Jacobs

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My Husband Was A Hospital Architect And He Was Working On Some Hospitals In Alberta, And I Told Him To Try To Find Out What They Thought About Separatism. He Would Come Back On Weekends. He Said "well, I Think I Found Out How They Feel About Separatism. I Brought It Up At Lunch In The Cafeteria, And Everybody At The Table Was Silent And Then Somebody Said 'let's Change The Subject'."

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Subsidiarity Is The Principle That Government Works Best Most Responsibly And Responsively When It Is Closest To The People It Serves And The Needs It Addresses. Fiscal Accountability Is The Principle That Institutions Collecting And Disbursing Taxes Work Most Responsibly When They Are Transparent To Those Providing The Money.

While Politicians, Clergy, Creators Of Advertisements, And Other Worthies Assert Stoutly That The Family Is The Foundation Of Society, The Nuclear Family, As An Institution, Is Currently In Grave Trouble.

Nuclear Families

To Seek "causes" Of Poverty In This Way Is To Enter An Intellectual Dead End Because Poverty Has No Causes. Only Prosperity Has Causes.

But Look What We Have Built Low-income Projects That Become Worse Centers Of Delinquency, Vandalism And General Social Hopelessness Than The Slums They Were Supposed To Replace. Cultural Centers That Are Unable To Support A Good Bookstore. Civic Centers That Are Avoided By Everyone But Bums. Promenades That Go From No Place To Nowhere And Have No Promenaders. Expressways That Eviscerate Great Cities. This Is Not The Rebuilding Of Cities. This Is The Sacking Of Cities.

Lots Of Things Are Not Possible For Municipalities, Suburbs, Or Collections Of Them Now. They Are Not Possible And They Would Become Possible, Because They Would Have More Authority. They Would Have The Same Authority As A Province Now.

Artists, Whatever Their Medium, Make Selections From The Abounding Materials Of Life, And Organize These Selections Into Works That Are Under The Control Of The Artist.... In Relation To The Inclusiveness And Literally Endless Intricacy Of Life, Art Is Arbitrary, Symbolic And Abstracted. That Is Its Value And The Source Of Its Own Kind Of Order And Coherence.

(the Psuedoscience Of Planning Seems Almost Neurotic In Its Determination To Imitate Empiric Failure And Ignore Empiric Success.)

I Have Learned Yet Again (this Has Been Going On All My Life) What Folly It Is To Take Any Thing For Granted Without Examining It Skeptically.

When We Deal With Cities We Are Dealing With Life At Its Most Complex And Intense. Because This Is So, There Is A Basic Esthetic Limitation On What Can Be Done With Cities: A City Cannot Be A Work Of Art.

I Get Absolutely Ruthless In My Own Way About Not Doing Anything Else When I Am Trying To Concentrate On Writing A Book. I Have To Stick To It And Concentrate.

A Region Is An Area Safely Larger Than The Last One To Whose Problems We Found No Solution.

It Is Immoral For Powerless People To Accept This Powerlessness. They May Not Succeed In Getting Power But They Can Fight For It, And If Enough Fight For It, It Makes It Very Difficult For The People With The Big Sticks.

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.

Nothing Is So Clear In History That Is It Happens For Any One Thing. It Seems That A Lot Of Things Come Together To Make Great Changes.

This Is What A City Is, Bits And Pieces That Supplement Each Other And Support Each Other.

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Everybody's Got A Worldview, Whether They Know They Have It Or They Don't. They Might Even Get It When They Are Little Tiny Kids. Suppose They Get It When They Are In College, Which Is Often The Case, Or In High School, Whatever. Everything They Learn After That Or Every Thing They See After That, They Fit It Into That Worldview. And They Are Making Coherence Of What's Good, What's Bad, What Will Work, What Won't Work, What's Noble, What's Ignoble, And So On... All Through This Filter.

This Is Something Everyone Knows: A Well-used City Street Is Apt To Be A Safe Street. A Deserted City Street Is Apt To Be Unsafe.

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Not Tv Or Illegal Drugs But The Automobile Has Been The Chief Destroyer Of American Communities.

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I Still Have A Lot Of Family In America. I Still Have A Lot Of Friends There. There Is A Lot That I Admire There Very Much. When I Find America Getting Too Much Criticized Outside America, I Want To Tell Them How Many Things Are Good About It.

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All Through Organized History, If You Wanted Prosperity You Had To Have Cities. Cities Are Places That Attract New People With New Ideas.

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Self Confidence

In Trading With Each Other Cities Can't Be In Too Different Stages Of Development, And They Can't Copy One Another. Backward Cities, Or Younger Cities, Or Newly Forming Cities In Supply Regions, Have To Develop To A Great Extent On One Another's Shoulders. This Is One Of The Terrible Things About Empires. Empires Want Them Only To Trade With The Empire, Which Doesn't Help Them At All. It's Just A Way Of Exploiting Them.

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By Its Nature, The Metropolis Provides What Otherwise Could Be Given Only By Traveling; Namely, The Strange.

It May Be That We Have Become So Feckless As A People That We No Longer Care How Things Work But Only The Kind Of Quick, Easy Outer Impression That They Get.

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[if Quebec Became Sovereign] There Would Be One Level Of Government That Would Be Missing, One Less Level Of Government. The Municipality Would Become The Second Level.

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My Husband Was A Hospital Architect And He Was Working On Some Hospitals In Alberta, And I Told Him To Try To Find Out What They Thought About Separatism. He Would Come Back On Weekends. He Said "well, I Think I Found Out How They Feel About Separatism. I Brought It Up At Lunch In The Cafeteria, And Everybody At The Table Was Silent And Then Somebody Said 'let's Change The Subject'."

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Never Underestimate

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People Who Try To Predict The Future By Extrapolating In A Line Of More Of What Exists - They Are Always Wrong.

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People Who Think Of Themselves As Exiles, I Find, Can Never Really Put Their Lives Together, Really.

That Was The Fear That There Would Be No Identity Anymore, For Canada. It Was Foolish, Because There Are So Many Examples Of Separatism, And Nothing Has Disintegrated, Unless They Went To War.

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Streets And Their Sidewalks-the Main Public Places Of A City-are Its Most Vital Organs.

Nations Are Political And Military Entities, And So Are Blocs Of Nations. But It Doesn't Necessarily Follow From This That They Are Also The Basic, Salient Entities Of Economic Life Or That They Are Particularly Useful For Probing The Mysteries Of Economic Structure, The Reasons For Rise And Decline Of Wealth. Indeed, The Failure Of National Governments And Blocs Of Nations To Force Economic Life To Do Their Bidding Suggests Some Sort Of Essential Irrelevance.

I Think That Things Are Going To Change Just Because People Get Too Damn Bored With What They Have.

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Modernism Really Started With People Getting Infatuated With The Idea Of "it's The Twentieth Century, Is This Suitable For The Twentieth Century." This Happened Before The First World War And It Wasn't Just The Soldiers. You Can See It Happening If You Read The Bloomsbury Biographies. It Was A Reaction To A Great Extent Against Victorianism. There Was So Much That Was Repressive And Stuffy. Victorian Buildings Were Associated With It, And They Were Regarded As Very Ugly. Even When They Weren't Ugly, People Made Them Ugly. They Were Painted Hideously.

Does Anyone Suppose That, In Real Life, Answers To Any Of The Great Questions That Worry Us Today Are Going To Come Out Of Homogeneous Settlements?

Cities Never Flourish Alone. They Have To Be Trading With Other Cities.

[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.

In Our American Cities, We Need All Kinds Of Diversity.

Sentimentality About Nature Denatures Everything It Touches.

The Point Of Cities Is Multiplicity Of Choice.

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There Are Dangers In Sentimentalizing Nature. Most Sentimental Ideas Imply, At Bottom, A Deep If Unacknowledged Disrespect. It Is No Accident That We Americans, Probably The World's Champion Sentimentalizers About Nature, Are At One And The Same Time Probably The World's Most Voracious And Disrespectful Destroyers Of Wild And Rural Countryside.

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Old Ideas Can Sometimes Use New Buildings. New Ideas Must Use Old Buildings.

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New Ideas Must Use Old Buildings

Reactions [on My 1979 Massey Lectures] Were From Anglophones. I'm One. But I'm Terrible At French. In Fact, There Was Practically No Reaction.

Power Is Supposed To Be So Corrupt. I Don't Think It's So Much Corrupt, In The Usual Sense Of The Word, As Stupid And Unrealistic. The More Power A Person Has, The Further He Gets From Reality.

There Is A Quality Even Meaner Than Outright Ugliness Or Disorder, And This Meaner Quality Is The Dishonest Mask Of Pretended Order, Achieved By Ignoring Or Suppressing The Real Order That Is Struggling To Exist And To Be Served.

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Entrepreneurial

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There Is No New World That You Make Without The Old World.

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In Wretched Outcomes, The Devil Is In The Details.

Observation Of Realities Has Never, To Put It Mildly, Been One Of The Strengths Of Economic Development Theory.

The Japanese Are Virtuosos. They Make Just The Little Accent That Makes All The Difference. So Much There Is So Beautiful - Just A Shop Window Display Is A Work Of Art. Just The Way They Make All Kinds Of Things Out Of Bamboo That Are So Ingenious. Just The Way This Little Bamboo Drain Or Latch Is So Beautiful. The Masonry Around The Streams To Hold The Bank Are Beautiful - And Not All One Kind And Not Just Cement.

I Think That Part Of The Growing Popularity Of The New Urbanism Is Not Simply Because It Is So Rational, And Not Simply Because People Care So Much About Community Or Even Understand It, Or The Relation Of Sprawl To The Ruination Of The Natural World. But They Just Don't Like What Is Around. And They Will Be Ruthless With It.

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Redundancy Is Expensive But Indispensable.

Credentialing, Not Education, Has Become The Primary Business Of North American Universities.

American Universities

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New Ideas Often Need Old Buildings.

You Can't Rely On Bringing People Downtown, You Have To Put Them There.

City Diversity Represents Accident And Chaos.

I Think It Is Fatal To Specialize. And All Kinds Of Things Show Us That And That The More Diverse We Are In What We Can Do, The Better.

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To Science, Not Even The Bark Of A Tree Or A Drop Of Pond Water Is Dull Or A Handful Of Dirt Banal. They All Arouse Awe And Wonder.

The Trouble With Paternalists Is That They Want To Make Impossibly Profound Changes, And They Choose Impossibly Superficial Means For Doing So.

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Neighborhoods Built Up All At Once Change Little Physically Over The Years As A Rule...[residents] Regret That The Neighborhood Has Changed. Yet The Fact Is, Physically It Has Changed Remarkably Little. People's Feelings About It, Rather, Have Changed. The Neighborhood Shows A Strange Inability To Update Itself, Enliven Itself, Repair Itself, Or To Be Sought After, Out Of Choice, By A New Generation. It Is Dead. Actually It Was Dead From Birth, But Nobody Noticed This Much Until The Corpse Began To Smell.

Advanced Cultures Are Usually Sophisticated Enough, Or Have Been Sophisticated Enough At Some Point In Their Pasts, To Realize That Foxes Shouldn't Be Relied On To Guard Henhouses.

Americans Have Got It So Dinged Into Them That They Are The Most Fortunate People On Earth, And That The Rest Of The World - The Sooner It Copies What America Is Like, The Better.

In Small Settlements Everyone Knows Your Affairs. In The City Everyone Does Not-only Those You Choose To Tell Will Know About You. This Is One Of The Attributes Of Cities That Is Precious To Most City People.

There Are Still An Awful Lot Of Intelligent, Clever Constructive Americans And They Are Still Doing Clever Constructive Things.

Some Of The Large [municipalities] In Quebec Can Contain Within Them Most Of The Answers To Their Own Practical Problems. And So Lots Of Different Possibilities For Doing Things In A Practical And Different Way Become Available.

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