Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems. Big cities have difficulties in abundance, because they have people in abundance.
Interpretation
Human existence is inherently challenging and urban environments amplify these challenges due to their density and complexity.
Jane Jacobs highlights the inherent difficulties of being human, asserting that the challenges we face in life are magnified in densely populated urban areas. With more people living closely together, the issues of social interaction, resource allocation, and community relationships become more complex, leading to a multitude of societal problems that are often overlooked in idealized visions of city life.
In practice
During an urban development conference, one might cite this quote to emphasize the need for thoughtful city planning.
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. If so, there is little hope for our cities or probably for much else in our society. But I do not think this is so.
Streets and their sidewalks-the main public places of a city-are its most vital organs.
(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)
Whenever and wherever societies have flourished and prospered rather than stagnated and decayed, creative and workable cities have been at the core of the phenomenon. Decaying cities, declining economies, and mounting social troubles travel together. The combination is not coincidental.
This is what a city is, bits and pieces that supplement each other and support each other.
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.
I think we are blind. Blind people who can see, but do not see.
Humans arose ... as a fortuitous and contingent outcome of thousands of linked events, any one of which could have occurred differently and sent history on an alternative pathway that would not have led to consciousness.
The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during election of members of parliament; as soon as the members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing. In the brief moment of its freedom, the English people makes such a use of that freedom that it deserves to lose it.
To me, God is Truth and Love; God is ethics and morality: God is fearlessness. God is the source of Light and Life and yet He is above and beyond all these. God is conscience... He is a personal God to those who need His personal presence. He is embodied to those who need His touch. He is the purest essence. He simply is to those who have faith. He is all things to all men.
The balancing of the budget will not in itself place a teaspoonful of milk in a hungry baby's stomach, or remove the rags from its mother's back.
What a sublime idea of the infinite might of the great Architect, the Cause of all causes, the Father of all fathers, the Ens Entium! For if we would compare the Infinite, it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves.
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