Cities 07

I wish that, despite Teresa’s insistence that we read the intro to each writer, I hadn’t for Jane Jacobs. I wonder, had I not read the intro, whether her piece would have seemed as amateur as it did to me. The reason I’m blaming the intro for this is that I got impression that no one really took her seriously. Whatever, this is not the point. Despite her initially pedestrian (pun wholeheartedly intended) involvement in academia, I think that Jacobs make some very insightful and pointed observations. Her idea that cities are full of strangers from whom we need some way of feeling safe in order to operate and that this safety is actually peer-mediated totally makes sense. Jacobs very clearly delineates the features that are necessary for a street to become a “safety asset” (116). Unfortunately, what makes her argument seem unconvincing is that she relies on the common sense of her “eyes on the street” theory to speak for itself; without an explanation of the mechanisms behind the salvation in self-policing, the reader wonders whether her ideas are universally applicable or just the musings of someone about her own neighborhood structure.
Jacobs starts by saying that streets are the essence of a city. Ignoring what I think is just plain wrong (what happened to culture, buildings or, um, the people? Apparently Jacobs skipped reading Shakespeare entirely), I can say that she basically posits boring street life, boring city life; dangerous streets, dangerous city. Easy enough to follow. She continues to say that what differentiates urban cities from little towns and even suburbs are strangers. This poses a unique problem for city residents (i.e., one which does not affect suburban or rural residents): how does one feel safe enough to conduct the necessities of their life amongst all these unfamiliar people? Jacobs says that streets foster safety so long as they fulfill three things: there must be a clear demarcation between public and private, they must be monitored or watched (unofficially or otherwise), and must be fairly continuous used (116). She says that these qualities are necessary on city streets, but not rural or suburban ones, because these have less formal methods of control such as “reputation, gossip, approval, disapproval, and sanctions,” all of which, she says, are powered by resident-familiarity and word-of-mouth, two things allegedly absent from city life (116).
Here’s my problem. She never elaborates on these three vital traits or how they beget a safe environment. For example, why is it that the borders between public and private must be made clear? She later says that the in-between space is problematic, but not why. She never gets at what it is about surveillance that curtails crime. In fact, she says that in an urban setting, word-of-mouth is useless against crime, but it is actually one of the main mechanisms behind her theory, when it is working properly. There are no official warnings that a neighborhood is under surveillance by its residents (save for the occasional neighborhood watch sign), but somehow it is known that one area is perfect for burglary while another is a no-go. This corpus of knowledge and understanding is amassed somehow, and I bet that word-of-mouth has plenty to do with it. Her reliance on common sense being the, well, common language in which her ideas can be expressed has ultimately sold her short because she didn’t think, or at least explain, her theory through.
Another issue (which I haven’t really thought over perfectly so bear with me) is that she says that these characteristics of streets need to be so effective as to control the behavior of not only the residents but also visitors from less populated places. Then, in her anecdotal evidence of her own residential version of the street monitoring, she offers recollection of one disturbance perpetrated by a suburban kid. This pretty much shoots her theory all to hell, huh? I don’t quite get the point of using an anecdote, which is already pretty weak evidence, to more or less contradicting herself.
After all is said and done, I do think that there is some serious heft to Jacobs’s arguments. Unfortunately, the snobby academic in me chose this moment to flare and start with the “yeah, but…”s. Also, I totally jumped the gun and wrote this before reading the second Jacobs reading, so maybe she’ll have the perfect rebuttal to me.