Great reading, even though I must often reread every other sentence, and look up words I thought I knew (and often, still know, but its essence just a feeling, never a proper description in my mind.)
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In Death and Life, Jacobs also quoted Paul Tillich, who believed that the city, by its very nature, "provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely; the strange." Familiarity, whether of chain stores or of cookie-cutter subdivisions, erodes the autonomous intelligence and, in a weird way, undermines privacy. In the suburbs, I'm the stranger; I feel exposed. only in a crowded, diverse place like New York, surrounded by strangeness, do I come home to myself."
