Vigilantes are US

The urbanist Jane Jacobs celebrated the city’s “organized complexity.” She rhapsodized over “the daily ballet of Hudson Street”—her home in Greenwich Village (The Death and Life of Great American Cities,1961).

For Jacobs, her competitor Louis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938) offered merely “a morbid and biased catalog of ills” (Death and Life, 20). Mumford’s solution, the Garden City, promoted flight to the suburbs that was enabled top-down: by President Eisenhower’s interstates and by Robert Moses’s parkways.

What made the city’s chaos livable for Jacobs came bottom-up: “eyes on the street.” Density on urban streets promises safety.