“It is sufficient, at this point, to say that if we are to maintain a city society that can diagnose and keep abreast of deeper social problems, the starting point must be, in any case, to strengthen whatever workable forces for maintaining safety and civilization do exist – in the cities we do have. To build city districts that are custom made for easy crime is idiotic. Yet that is what we do.” [Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chapter 2, “The uses of sidewalks: safety,” 31]

I loved this authors method of breaking down the interpersonal relations between strangers within cities into concepts like barbarism and jungle regions in relation to the “good safe areas”. Descriptions like these, and explanations of what these descriptions relate to re-framed the way I think of what a quote on quote bad street is. My own home is within 2 blocks of the Nostrand ave Projects. Everyone knows that the streets encompassed by and surrounding that 4 block area is unsafe, particularly at night. They know this by the high rate of crime incidence, the nonstop police presence, and the quiet streets at night. Everyone in my neighborhood knows someone who’s been assaulted or robbed there. But what I’ve never considered is that this is the result of a cycle; that the fear of streets keep people off of them, the lack of people on the streets creates more dangerous, which prompts more people to stay off of the street. Rinse and repeat, after years of everyone “knowing” that these streets are full of thugs, if you are there out past 9 pm you may see a dozen people roaming the sidewalk in a half hour, compared to the dozen people who would pass you every minute during the day. It results in a silly system which faults those who live in these communities, which in my own experience with the Nostrand Projects resulting in a blame landing on entire minority groups paired together by color, socioeconomics, and location.