Who Were the Sea Peoples?

There have been a number of explanations put forward, new policing techniques and the waning of the crack epidemic among them. But I think the most important explanation has been largely overlooked: planners (mostly) stopped mucking about poor neighborhoods. To understand my point here, consider Jane Jacobs: Statistical people are a fiction for many reasons, which is that there treated as if infinitely interchangeable. Real people are unique, they invest years of their lives in significant relationships with other unique people, and are not interchangeable in the least. Severed from their relationships, they are destroyed as effective social beings--sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever.  In city neighborhoods, whether streets are districts, if too many slowly grown public relationships are disrupted at once, all kinds of havoc can occur--so much habit, instability and helplessness, that it sometimes seems time will never again get in it's licks. She goes on to qu...

Here , for The University Bookman .

"Tragedy tells what cannot be told, the passage from what precedes action to properly human action. It tells of the passage to the city, the coming to be of the city. For the city enables one to act. The city is that ordering of the human world that makes action possible and meaningful." -- Pierre Manent, Metamorphoses of the City , p. 4

"People who live in residential towers, for example, consistently tell psychologist that they feel lonely and crowded by other people at the very same time ." -- Happy City , p. 126 And in the naked light I saw Ten thousand people, maybe more People talking without speaking People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share And no one dared Disturb the sound of silence -- Simon and Garfunkel

Not so fast: "teens [from the suburbs] were much more anxious and depressed than teens from inner-city neighborhoods who were faced with all manner of environmental and social ills. The privileged suburban teens smoked more, drank more, and used more hard drugs than inner-city teens..." -- Happy City , p. 60

"the farther house was from a vibrant city center, more likely it was to experience foreclosure during the crash, the deeper its price collapsed, the less likely that price bounced back since, and the less analysts now expected to be worth in the future." Charles Montgomery, Happy City , p. 49