The Economy of Cities Quotes

“The primary economic conflict, I think, is between people whose interests are with already well-established economic activities, and those whose interests are with the emergence of new economic activities.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“Cities are not ordained; they are wholly existential. To say that a city grew “because” it was located at a good site for trading is, in view of what we can see in the real world, absurd. Few resources in this world are more common than good sites for trading but most of the settlements that form at these good sites do not become cities.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“Conformity and monotony, even when they are embellished with a froth of novelty, are not attributes of developing and economically vigorous cities. They are attributes of stagnant settlements.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“we can be absolutely sure of a few things about future cities. The cities will not be smaller, simpler or more specialized than cities of today. Rather, they will be more intricate, comprehensive, diversified, and larger than today’s, and will have even more complicated jumbles of old and new things than ours do. The bureaucratized, simplified cities, so dear to present-day city planners and urban designers, and familiar also to readers of science fiction and utopian proposals, run counter to the processes of city”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“Artificial symptoms of prosperity or a “good image” do not revitalize a city, but only explicit economic growth processes for which there are no substitutes.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“Is it not possible for the economy of a city to be highly efficient, and for the city also to excel at the development of new goods and services? No, it seems not. The conditions that promote development and the conditions that promote efficient production and distribution of already existing goods and services are not only different, in most ways they are diametrically opposed”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“Adding and Dividing Work Ancient people seem to have understood perfectly well that economic life is a matter of adding new goods and services. But instead of seeing the logic and order by which this happens, they saw magic. Important activities had been given to men or taught to men in remote times by gods; they had been stolen from gods; they had been brought along, like a trousseau, by demigod progenitors of people.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities

“where large organizations are relied upon for economic expansion and development—that is, where small organizations find little opportunity to multiply, to find financing, and to add new work to old—the economy inevitably stagnates.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities