Eyes on the Digital Street

Jacobs argued, against the planning orthodoxy of her time, that the safest streets were not the streets with the most police but the streets with the most people — different people, present for different reasons, at different times, their ordinary attention to their surroundings producing a distributed, redundant, self-maintaining safety that no formal system could replicate. She called this mechanism eyes on the street. It worked because it was emergent: no single pair of eyes was critical, the coverage was not planned, and the knowledge — who belongs here, who does not, who needs help, who is trouble — circulated through casual contact among the regulars who happened to be present.