Home > Work > The Death and Life of Great American Cities
61 " It is futile to plan a city's appearance, or speculate on how to endow it with a pleasing appearance of order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has. To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble. "
― Jane Jacobs , The Death and Life of Great American Cities
62 " 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. "
63 " The pseudoscience of city planning and its companion, the art of city design, have not yet broken with the specious comfort of wishes, familiar superstitions, oversimplifications, and symbols, and have not yet embarked upon the adventure of probing the real world. "
64 " The first thing to understand is that the public peace – the sidewalk and street peace – of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by anintricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, andenforced by the people themselves. ... No amount of policing can enforce civilization where the normal, casualenforcement of it has broken down. "
65 " Our irreplaceable heritage of Grade I agricultural land (a rare treasure of nature on this earth) is sacrificed for highways or supermarket parking lots as ruthlessly and unthinkingly as the trees in the woodlands are uprooted, the streams and rivers polluted and the air itself filled with the gasoline exhausts (products of eons of nature’s manufacturing) required in this great national effort to cozy up with a fictionalized nature and flee the “unnaturalness” of the city. "
66 " The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. "
67 " Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind. "
68 " Naturally, in time, forceful and able men, admired administrators, having swallowed the initial fallacies and having been provisioned with tools and with public confidence, go on logically to the greatest destructive excesses, which prudence or mercy might previously have forbade. "
69 " They differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers. "
70 " Our failures with city neighborhoods are, ultimately, failures in localized self-government. "
71 " most city diversity is the creation of incredible numbers of different people and different private organizations, with vastly differing ideas and purposes, planning and contriving outside the formal framework of public action. "
72 " This is a common assumption: that human beings are charming in small numbers and noxious in large numbers. "
73 " But we also need, among other things, to abandon conventional planning ideas about city neighborhoods. The 'ideal' neighborhood of planning and zoning theory, too large in scale to possess any competence or meaning as a street neighborhood, is at the same time too small in scale to operate as a district. It is unfit for anything. It will not serve as even a point of departure. Like the belief in medical bloodletting, it was a wrong turn in the search for understanding. "
74 " That such wonders may be accomplished, people who get marked with the planners’ hex signs are pushed about, expropriated, and uprooted much as if they were the subjects of a conquering power. "
75 " 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. "
76 " To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble. "
77 " This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them. "
78 " Antras būdas yra slėptis transporto priemonėse. Taip daroma stambiųjų gyvūnų rezervatuose Afrikoje, kur turistai įspėjami nieku gyvu neišlipti iš mašinų, kol nepasieks viešbučio. Taip pat elgiamasi ir Los Andžele. "
79 " Zoners, highway planners, legislators, land-use planners, and parks and playground planners—none of whom live in an ideological vacuum—constantly use, as fixed points of reference, these two powerful visions and the more sophisticated merged vision. "
80 " Somehow, when the fair became part of the city, it did not work like the fair. "