Home > Work > Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs
1 " Jacobs never relished the role of prophet, but at the end of her life she hazarded two related but opposite guesses. One path was what she called, in Dark Age Ahead, “cultural collapse.” Jacobs found evidence of imminent decline in the erosion of family, community, science, education, governance, and professional integrity in North America. "
― Jane Jacobs , Vital Little Plans: The Short Works of Jane Jacobs
2 " We are becoming too solemn about downtown. The architects, planners—and businessmen—are seized with dreams of order, and they have become fascinated with scale models and bird’s-eye views. This is a vicarious way to deal with reality, and it is, unhappily, symptomatic of a design philosophy now dominant: buildings come first, for the goal is to remake the city to fit an abstract concept of what, logically, it should be. But whose logic? The logic of the projects is the logic of egocentric children, playing with pretty blocks and shouting “See what I made!”—a viewpoint much cultivated in our schools of architecture and design. And citizens who should know better are so fascinated by the sheer process of rebuilding that the end results are secondary to them. "
3 " You’ve got to get out and walk. Walk, and you will see that many of the assumptions on which the projects depend are visibly wrong. You will see, for example, that a worthy and well-kept institutional center does not necessarily upgrade its surroundings. "
4 " For her, the rallying cry of the 1968 Paris general strikes—“Under the paving stones, the beach!”—wasn’t likely to inspire. Beneath the city streets, she might have retorted, was nothing more than the dirt to which we will all return. Another world isn’t possible, certainly not if it’s some eden of plenty and ease, reachable only by revolution or the utopian imagination. A better world is here already, in the streets themselves, waiting to be discovered and brought forth by all of us, not just a radical vanguard. Jacobs looked askance at any situation in "
5 " Always idiosyncratic and unorthodox, often surprising, often willing to risk being wrong if it means reorienting stale conventional wisdom, she pushes beyond the familiar alarms to see urban transformation as a source of radical possibility and opportunity, not nostalgia and loss. More than a tribune of the ideal neighborhood, Jacobs was perhaps our greatest theorist of the city not as a modern machine for living but as a living human system, geared for solving its own problems. "
