Mark Nixon > Mark's Quotes

“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Detroit is largely composed, today, of seemingly endless square miles of low-density failure.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Automobiles are often conveniently tagged as the villains responsible for the ills of cities and the disappointments and futilities of city planning. But the destructive effect of automobiles are much less a cause than a symptom of our incompetence at city building.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“Everyone is aware that tremendous numbers of people concentrate in city downtowns and that, if they did not, there would be no downtown to amount to anything--certainly not one with much downtown diversity.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“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.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“His aim was the creation of self sufficient small towns,really very nice towns if you were docile and had no plans of your own and did not mind spending your life with others with no plans of their own. As in all Utopias, the right to have plans of any significance belonged only to the planner in charge.

- discussing Ebenezer Howards' Garden City”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“The trouble with paternalists is that they want to make impossibly profound changes, and they choose impossibly superficial means for doing so.”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. ”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)”
― Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

“There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“The medium is the message.”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

“First we build the tools, then they build us.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“The car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century.”
― Marshall McLuhan

“Schizophrenia may be a necessary consequence of literacy. [p. 32]”
― Marshall McLuhan, La galaxia Gutenberg: Génesis del homo typographicus