In Fact...

JANE JACOBS

Roberta Brandes Gratz and Stephen A. Goldsmith, co-founders of The Center for the Living City at Purchase College, write: On the Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design website is a tribute to author and urban activist Jane Jacobs, who died April 24. Central to this organization's international workshops on creating policeable places is the concept of "eyes on the street," a term coined by Jacobs in the first of her nine books, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). In the clear, accessible language that is one of Jacobs's trademarks, "eyes on the street" illustrates how the safest streets have a multiplicity of uses--as many as possible--that draw many people for different purposes all day and evening. The application of "eyes on the street" in police training sessions is just one extraordinary example of the breadth and depth of Jacobs's influence around the world. So ingrained in the culture have concepts like "mixed use" become that few who use them know where they originated. Jacobs cared little for the credit but a lot for the utility of her ideas. Understanding about anything, she argued, comes only through direct observation and persistent inquiry. Her inclusive spirit emphasized the value of all participants and gave greater weight to the informed citizen than the credentialed expert. This simple truth she described once as "trusting the local." She was an advocate of organic cities, a protector of authentic places, a fierce opponent of grand plans for highways at the expense of mass transit, a promoter of modest accretions to existing places instead of over-designed new ones, a proponent of economically and ethnically mixed neighborhoods, an astute observer of how economies and ecologies work. She listened carefully to citizens' testimony at public hearings, never resisted the opportunity to stand up to power and wished only for people to continue the dialogue she had started, not to duplicate her words. It took a while but she came to understand the breadth of her influence. Yet she was troubled by people who misapplied her thinking or absorbed only part of the melody and not the full song. The real crime now would be to reduce her thinking to some single note about cities rather than to listen to the full orchestration of her works (see www.thenation.com for an uncut version).

PAMUK AT PEN

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