jacobs eyes on the street law
To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks..kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.. unconscious do-it-yourself surveillance system eyes on the street – jane jacobs
but didn’t/doesn’t/won’t work.. if anyone ‘street watching/managing’ (282) .. already not-us ness.. oi.. cancerous distractions/parasites/whatevers
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental expo labeling).. to facil a legit global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of m\a\p
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adding page while reading colin ward‘s anarchy in action:
One of the few observers of modern city life to think about the way social control actually operates in the contemporary urban environment is Jane Jacobs, who discusses the function of streets and their pavements or sidewalks in these terms:
To keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks … Great cities … differ from towns and suburbs in basic ways, and one of these is that cities are, by definition, full of strangers …
The bedrock attitude of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all those strangers. He must not feel automatically menaced by them … The first thing to understand is that the public peace — the sidewalk and street peace — of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as the police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. In some city areas — older public housing projects and streets with a very high population turnover are often conspicuous examples – the keeping of public sidewalk law and order is left almost entirely to the police and special guards. Such places are jungles. No amount of police can enforce civilisation where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.
*agreed.. that includes.. ‘eyes on the street’ ness
Her point is that the populous street has an unconscious do-it-yourself surveillance system of eyes in the street, the eyes of the residents and the users of shops, cafes, news-stands and so on:
Safety on the streets by surveillance and mutual policing of one another sounds grim, but in real life it is not grim. The safety of the streets works best, most casually, and with least frequent taint of suspicion or hostility precisely where people are using and most enjoying the city streets voluntarily and are least conscious, normally, that they are policing …
oi.. same song.. still policing/perpetuating not-us ness
In settlements that are smaller and simpler than big cities, controls on acceptable public behaviour, if not on crime, seem to operate with greater or lesser success through a web of *reputation, gossip, approval, disapproval and sanctions, all of which are powerful if people know each other and words travel But a city’s streets, which must control not only the behaviour of the people of the city but also of visitors from suburbs and towns who want to have a big time away from the gossip and sanctions at home, have to operate by more direct, straightforward methods. It is a wonder cities have solved such an inherently difficult problem at all. And yet **in many streets they do it magnificently.
*huge oi to that as well.. huge oi
**so.. they perpetuate sea world magnificently.. oi
103
The English reader of Mrs Jacobs’ book will by now no longer be amazed by her assumption of the insecurity of the American citizen in public places from “rape, muggings, beatings, hold-ups and the like”. Today, she declares, “barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in the end”. *In spite of her faith in the effectiveness of informal social control, nothing is going to destroy her belief in the necessity of the police.
*’informal social control’ still cancerous distraction.. killing us all
a little more on the topic from errico..
The terrifying breakdown of social cohesion in the American city, in spite of intense institutionalised police surveillance equipped with every sophisticated aid to public control, illustrates that social behaviour depends upon mutual responsibility rather than upon the policeman. The most honest and unequivocal attempt to grasp this particular nettle from the anarchist point of view comes from Errico Malatesta:
This necessary defence against those who violate, not the status quo, but the deepest feelings which distinguish man from the beasts, is one of the pretexts by which governments justify their existence. We must eliminate all the social causes of crime, we must develop in man brotherly feelings, and mutual respect; we must, as Fourier put it, seek useful alternatives to crime. But if, and so long as, there are criminals, either people will find the means, and have the energy, to defend themselves directly against them, or the police and the magistrature will reappear, and with them, government. We do not solve a problem by denying its existence …
perhaps.. but the problem we have is much deeper.. and.. denying anything is a cancerous distraction.. and.. i don’t think we have to know it to solve it.. because the answer is already in each one of us (almaas holes law et al)..
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more from googling.. finding her book called .. eyes on the street [https://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Street-Life-Jane-Jacobs/dp/0345803337]:
Jane Jacobs wrote that urban neighborhoods were safer when there were “eyes on the street”: that is, residents and shopkeepers who are naturally drawn to the life of the street, and who, in the course of their activities, monitor the street.
the more people in the streets, the safer they become. Their “eyes on the street” provide informal surveillance of the urban environment. For residents to move safely through the streets, other people need to be present, contributing to an atmosphere of safety.
from npr on the book [https://www.npr.org/2016/09/28/495615064/eyes-on-the-street-details-jane-jacobs-efforts-to-put-cities-first]:
Kanigel’s biography of Jacobs is called Eyes on the Street, a phrase that Jacobs herself coined about the crucial importance of a vibrant street life to neighborhood safety and community. Like Jacobs, Kanigel is a lively writer and his biography is comprehensive, clear-eyed, and even sporadically witty. In Kanigel’s view, Jacobs — the activist and original thinker — was partly just “born that way.” She was expelled from 3rd grade for standing up to her teacher and Kanigel sees a through-line to later, more famous moments of bucking the status quo.
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more from jane jacobs‘ death and life of cities:
p. 257 – massive single uses in cities have a quality in common with each other. they form borders, and borders in cities usually make destructive neighbors.
p. 259 – the root trouble with borders, as city neighbors, is that they are apt to form dead ends for most users of city streets. they represent, for most people, most of the time, barriers.
borders can thus ten to form vacuums of use adjoining them. or to put it another way, by oversimplifying the use of the city at one place, on a large scale, they tend to simplify the use which people give to the adjoining territory too and this simplification of use – meaning fewer users, with fewer different purposes and destinations at hand – feeds upon itself.
this is serious, because literal and continuous mingling of people, present because of different purposes, is the only device that keeps street safe.
p. 282 – however, cities need not “bring back” a middle class and carefully protect it like an darticial growth. cities grow the middle class. but to keep it as it grows, to keep it as a stabilizing force in the form of a self-diversified population, means considering the city’s people valuable and worth retaining, right where they are, before they become middle class.
furthermore, although these people at the bottom are hardly successes by most standards, in their street neighborhoods most of them are successes. the make up a vital part of the web of casual public life.. *the amount of time they devote to street watching and street management makes some of the rest of us parasites upon them.
huge.. this is huge (above) – vital part of web of casual public life..
*if anyone ‘street watching/managing’ already not-us ness.. oi.. cancerous distractions/parasites/whatevers
p. 317 – it is so easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic.. or immigrants.. or whimsies of the middle class. the decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated. it goes right down to:
what we think we want, and to
our ignorance about how cities work.
to me.. even/much deeper.. we have no idea what we want/need.. that’s why need means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
p. 321 – most of the aims i have been writing about, aims such as unslumming slums, catalyzing diversity, nurturing lively streets, are unrecognized today as objectives of city planning. therefore, planners and the agencies of action that carry out plans possess neither strategies nor tactics for carrying out such aims.
however, although city planning lacks tactics for building cities that can work like cities, it does possess plenty of tactics. they are aimed at carrying out strategic lunacies. unfortunately, they are effective.
p. 322 – … we become the prisoners of our tactics, seldom looking behind them at the strategies.
did public housing fail completely? hosing expert Charles Abrams has asked, after castigating it as ill-conceived for its purposes and as having, in combination with urban-renewal clearance, attained “absurdity.”
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be you. 