8
Agenda for the Humanity
of Cities

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he agenda proposed here is intended for all behavioral scientists who want to commit their urban research to deepening and extending our knowledge of how the humanity of cities may be augmented and enhanced and, corre- spondingly, of how the inhumanities that afflict life in cities may be minimized. It is also intended to stimulate and encourage anyone who is concerned about the quality of life in cities.
Previous chapters have presented many detailed examples of the humane and inhumane in city life, often intertwined with each other. Let us summarize six major conclusions derived from these studies:
(1) Most of the negative assumptions about the intrinsic nature of city life contained in the bipolar moralistic model are contradicted by empirical findings on occupational communities, connections, and subcultures.

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Agenda for the Humanity of Cities 219
(2) Destructive vicissitudes are evidence of the fragility and vulnerability of the urban fabric, but they do not mean that cities are doomed because they are inherently evil.
(3) Stereotyped groups are not monolithic but are, rather, internally diverse. Intergroup contacts, while they can generate conflict and tension, can also increase awareness of diversity and therefore counteract monolithic ste- reotyping.
(4) The humanity of cities can be adequately comprehended only from both the small-scale (microcosmic) and large-scale (macro cosmic) perspectives. Observing urban life from only one perspective results in a distorted view of reality.
(5) Among the large-scale components of urban life that impinge on small- scale life are powerful interest groups which tend to be greedy for profit and more power, frequently to the detriment of the lives of the powerless who may remain helplessly exploited or may respond with grass-roots movements.
(6) Megascale components of urban life exist beyond any particular city. We refer to them as societywide, national, or international factors that are not intrinsic to cities. They include overpopulation, rural socioeconomic deterioration, water and topsoil depletion, and worldwide national budget allocations that deflect huge armaments expenditures from more construc- tive needs and purposes. All of these affect cities, mostly adversely, al- though armament manufacture, from a limited perspective, can be beneficial in terms of jobs.

In previous chapters, we have repeatedly mentioned the various research methods and orientations urban scholars use. Instead of summarizing that material here, we highlight it and the urban agenda by noting some new directions proposed for urban anthropology. Essentially, they can be distilled into refining small-scale research on the one hand and, on the other, under- taking research on the large-scale dimensions of urban life.
Lawrence Watson (1981) and Owen Lynch (1979) call for greater sensitivity to the differences between "etic" and "emic" research. These terms have not been used heretofore because they are anthropological jargon. However, the actors' perspectives discussed at the very beginning of the book are essentially what is meant by emic perspectives. Etic research, in contrast, imposes a theoretical model external to the behavior being observed. The modernization model, with its marginality corollary, and the bipolar model are two etic constructs that have required emic modifications. Watson (p. 444), in criticizing his own previous research on Guajiro Indian migrants in Maracaibo, Vene- zuela' shows that emic perspectives on his data yield more realistic results. Lynch (pp. 20-21) reaches the same conclusion about squatters in Bombay who turn out to be far more diversified than the Marxian model of exploited slum dwellers would predict. Although he does not mention the emic/etic issue by name, Kerry Feldman (1975:365) shows that well-established concepts of the nature of squatter economics do not stand up under detailed ethnographic scrutiny that is free of older preconceptions.
The need for anthropological, and basically emic, research in the large-scale arena has been expressed in different ways. One is research on formal orga- nizational life:



220 THE HUMANITY OF CITIES
An understanding of how everyday activities, decisions, factions, and re- lationships actually work within an organization requires an analysis of informal social networks. Inside formal organizations, and often cross-cut- ting them, are systems of social relations that develop because people have "natural" affinities to others. . . based on class, sex, education, age, common interests, or whatever. No matter how or why they form, they are always there and affect organizational activity in a major way (Britan and Cohen 1980:14).

Agenda for the Humanity of Cities 221

DISSOLVING BOUNDARIES

Applied anthropologists attempting to become cultural brokers for ethnic groups in their relations with a city power structure must study the power structure itself to be effective brokers as Carole Hill (1975:344) concludes in her research on the inadequate services provided ethnic groups in Atlanta.
While the understanding of a city's power structure involves the kinds of insight Gerald Britan and Ronald Cohen mention, it also involves a broad, holistic view. Joseph Bensman provides such a view of New York in his con- clusion to The Apple Sliced:
Any examination of all the types of communities, whether based on race, ethnicity, deviancy; profession, occupation, or class; or leisure, the arts or avocation; or . . . residence, spatial concentration, or ambience would sug- gest an almost uncountable number of specific communities in New York City and in the outlying areas into which these communities extend. Given these myriad of often unknown, unrelated, and conflicting communities, a central problem for the study of the city and for all urban sociology is the means by which these separate communities coexist and are integrated, at least to the extent that such integration exists. . . . [T]he basic question is, Why do all these separate communities and cultures not fly off in all di- rections or erupt in a war of all against all? (1984:341).

Conflicts between subcultures are typical of urban life but not necessarily permanent. Ronald Bayor (1978:chapters 8 & 9) shows how the conflicts among Jews, Irish, Germans, and Italians in New York City that peaked between the 'two world wars were resolved with effective leadership (often slow in coming) and recognition that there were vitai interests in conflict resolution. Gentrification processes in Auckland, New Zealand (Loomis 1980:193-95), and in a northeastern United States city (Williams 1985:270-71) have placed into juxtaposition groups differentiated by social class and ethnicity. Still in the process of change and adjustments, barriers remain among these groups. Whether the barriers would be breached remained to be seen at the times of observation.
Ethnic barriers can be weakened by attenuation and at the same time leave intragroup support systems intact. For example, among members of the nu- clear Japanese community of Seattle, there has been extensive marriage to outsiders. Nevertheless, the women, in particular, maintain contacts in the interest of group solidarity (Leonetti and Newell-Morris 1982:31). In Hong Kong, Gregory Guldin distinguishes between ethnic neighborhoods and ethnic communities and illustrates them with examples of two minority Chinese groups. One is composed of immigrants from Shanghai, the other of people originally from Fujian who had sojourned in the Philippines (part of the ex- tensive "overseas Chinese" presence in Southeast Asia and the Western Pa- cific). At an earlier time, both groups had their own ethnic neighborhoods (geographically concentrated multifunctional support systems). In time, the Shanghainese neighborhood dissolved, but an ethnic community, a dispersed network of kin and friendship ties, remained (1980:257). Guldin sees this process as a kind of evolution in which the intensity of ethnic ties, and changes in it, needs to be measured.

Megascale phenomena that are components of human nature, such as greed, fear, and hatred of the "other," are, as we have repeatedly seen, very much part of urban life, but they are not specific or intrinsic to cities, and their genesis and control are far beyond the expertise of urban scholars or, for that matter, any behavioral scientists.
What are not beyond scholarly expertise, however, are those megascale phenomena that are products of human actions, such as overpopulation and others mentioned above. Among them is deindustrialization, the decline in employment in industrial production that has reached major proportions in the United States and Great Britain, the two earliest societies to become industrial. In the 1980s, this process has involved plant closings, disastrous to many cities, and the flight of capital and manufacturing to Third World, low- wage areas. The immediate causes are the decisions of corporate executives. Katherine Newman (1985:6-12) and colleagues devote a triple issue of the journal, Urban Anthropology, to this subject. They emphasize the need to study and understand better the macroscale operational factors and the microscale effects.
The remainder of this chapter reviews a variety of ways in which the hu- manity of cities is asserted-bridges between subcultures, positive adaptations to distemic space, grass-roots movements, and the megascale phenomena that must be coped with rather than succumbed to. -

THE SPIRIT OF ACCOMMODATION

Howard Becker and Irving Louis Horowitz claim that in San Francisco a "culture of civility" eases tensions among various "deviant" groups, although it does not characterize social class and ethnic differences. Its achievement, they admit, is problematic, but it is not a figment of utopian imagination. "Accommodation requires, as a first condition, that the parties involved prize peace and stability enough to give up some of what they want so that the others may have their desires satisfied as well" (1971:15).
An innovative type of accommodation in United States cities is the com- munal household that does not "accord with stereotyped notions of what living in a group is like. Members of these groups h,aven't withdrawn from society- they don't follow a guru or require one another to hold any faith in common. Their goal is simply to live together in a way that is caring and fun" (Raimy 1979:4). These households have a great diversity of membership arrangements other than conventional family groups. Communal motivations are economic help, housekeeping efficiency, concern for the environment, and concern about personal growth. "There is one underlying motivation that is the most im- portant reason people join or start communal households. . . 'companionship,



222 THE HUMANITY OF CITIES
security, and a supportive atmosphere' "(Raimy 1979:14-15). These ties coun-
teract the subcultural identities we have considered.
Community newspapers often heighten awareness of local issues in Amer- ican cities. An unusual one is The Tenderloin Times, serving San Francisco's Tenderloin district and published in four languages: Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, and English. Indochinese immigrants now amount to half the district's pop- ulation.
Given the diverse nature of the area, the paper has to "promote a greater sense of understanding of the different communities," Waters [the editor] says. "We've tried to break down some of the cultural barriers that exist just by letting people know who their neighbors are, and what kinds of things they went through." The Tenderloin Times English section, the bulk of the paper, often runs stories about the refugee community, while the Asian pages frequently explain the various kinds of social services available (Quinones 1986:16).

Agenda for the Humanity of Cities 223 homogeneity combined with community heterogeneity). Merry believes that crime and fear of crime operate in Dover Square in a self-reinforcing system that is fundamentally fear of strange and unknown "others" (p. 14). Dover Square residents have more otherness than, perhaps, they can cope with, coupled with the neighborhood's being in a transitional area where economic depression is a major problem. A variety of avoidance strategies prevents residents from learning to interact with members of other groups (p. 224).
Greater intergroup knowledge and recognition of common interests despite differences are needed to reduce intergroup hostilities:
The two successful interethnic organizations in the project are an infant care center and a day care program for older children, . . . essential for working mothers. People who work long hours are probably less inclined to devote time to organizations that satisfy only diffuse community needs or purely social or recreational ends if these organizations appear to be at all unsafe or uncomfortable.
The solution to urbanites' and suburbanites' fear of the city is not. . . more locks, bars, and guard dogs, or an enhanced police presence, but greater knowledge of the city and its residents (p. 241).

Local response to the paper has been "amazingly good," and it is highly re- garded by the city's mainstream media.
Generalizing from his observations of Levittown, Herbert Gans suggests a living arrangement that seems feasible and could be widely applicable: Putting together all the arguments for and against homogeneity suggests that the optimum solution, at least in communities of homeowners who are raising small children, is selective homogeneity at the block level and het- erogeneity at the community level. Whereas a mixture of population types, and especially of rich and poor, is desirable in the community, as a whole, heterogeneity on the block will not produce the intended tolerance, but will lead to conflict that is undesirable because it is essentially insoluble and thus becomes chronic. Selective homogeneity on the block will improve the tenor of neighbor relations, and will thus make it easier-although not easy-to realize heterogeneity at the community level (Gans 1967:172).
By "block" Gans means "an area in which frequent face-to-face relations take place, in most cases a sub-block of perhaps ten to twelve houses" (p. 172).

Ignorance exacerbates fear of the unknown, which exacerbates intergroup fears and hostilities.
Annemarie Bleiker, comparing her own and another study among working- class people in Cambridge, Mass., finds that close friendships and kin ties are not necessarily localized, as formulated by the "proximity model" others es- pouse. Members of the neighborhood she studied established strong relation- ships among one another but retained kin ties and friendships with more distant people. A sense of commitment to the neighborhood was the bridge across ethnic and other differences such as being oldtimers or newcomers (1972: 172).

CROSS-CUITING SUBCULTURAL BOUNDARIES

THE PROXIMITY OF HETEROGENEITY

We have already cited several cases in which actors' interests and the char- acteristics they share with members of other groups override subcultural boundaries. This situation seems most frequently to occur when members of
different racial/ethnic subcultures realize that they belong to the same social class subculture. Although this process may, one hopes, reduce the virulence of intergroup prejudices, it would seem to extend and augment social ties rather than replace one type with another as is certainly the case in three cities of sub-Saharan Africa. Jos (Nigeria), Kampala-Mengo (Uganda), and Nairobi (Kenya) are inhabited by a great variety of tribal and regional groups, and all remain intact as support and identity systems for their members. However, in each city some people have also developed wider social ties. In Jos,
ethnic groups attempt to project a favorable image. Since they intend to stay, they want to remain on good terms. They may donate their assembly hall for some civic purpose or rent it to other ethnic, social, business, or political groups. Through fines or other sanctions, they attempt to control their members' behavior so as not to damage the tribe's reputation in the community. Ethnic groups express pride in their traditions by holding pub- lic performances of plays, masquerades, and native dances. When they seek to raise money by staging formal dances, they may court community good-

Morris Milgram, a developer of integrated neighborhoods, reviews what has been accomplished in open housing and the difficulties that must be overcome by continually vigilant organized action. Where integration has been most successful, different groups have perceived important interests or character- istics that they have in common (1977:65).
"Dover Square" is a multi ethnic housing project in a large northeastern American city. In 1975-76, about half of its resident families were Chinese, one-quarter black, 12 percent white, and 6 percent Hispanic. In 1976, "it had the highest per capita rate of robberies and assaults in the city. . . . Yet in a survey of 101 residents, 75 percent said they did not think the project was dangerous" (Merry 1981:9). Nevertheless, 56 percent were afraid to walk around the neighborhood at night. Sally Merry analyzes these and other ap- parent anomalies. The physical layout of the project makes surveillance of distemic space difficult (discouraging the self-policing of neighborhoods Jane Jacobs emphasizes), and members of the four ethnic groups_are scattered evenly throughout the project (contrary to Gans's recommendation of block



224 THE HUMANITY OF CITIES
will by inviting prominent individuals of other ethnic groups to serve as
hosts or masters of ceremony (Plotnicov 1967:292).

Much of Leonard Plotnicov's presentation on Jos consists of interview ma- terial with a small number of individuals, of whom he says:
Regardless of the strength of tribal loyalties and the depth of parochial village sentiments, even the most traditional men relate positively, as in- dividuals, to Jos' conditions. For example, the Y oruba informant could ex- press both humaneness and friendship when asked to intercede and help settle the family disputes of his Hausa neighbors. The Tiv shared the de- lightful pastime of African drafts [checkers] with Y oruba men of his age, and had established a joking type of relationship with an old Hausa woman who lived across the street and who was friendly with his wife. The Ijaw informant's closest personal friends reflected a variety of ethnic back- grounds, and he also demonstrated civic responsibility when he occasionally gave (upon invitation) free professional advice to the Township Advisory Council and to his church congregation (p. 291).
In Nairobi, political participation since Kenya gained independence has evolved into a complex interweaving of ethnic and social class identities.
Social class and tribe are not necessarily incompatible with each other as principles of social and political division. In fact, the two can operate at the same time in producing political divisions in a society. . . . [I]ndividuals tend not only to be associated with other people of their own ethnic group but also with people from their own social status. [The] . . . well educated tend to have friends who are also well educated, while poor people also associate with other poor people. At the same time, they also tend to asso- ciate with people from their own tribe.
Class and ethnicity have a different importance in different areas of political life. . .. [P]olitical participation and information are related to class and not ethnicity, . . . attitudes toward the government since inde- pendence are a function of ethnicity, . . . assessments of living conditions since independence are determined by both class and ethnicity, and. . . formal group membership and the belief that politicians are overpaid are related to neither class nor ethnicity (Ross 1975:135-36).

In Kampala-Mengo, residents have evolved a citywide political system, in- cluding kinship modes of interaction, not identical with any intratribal polit- ical system. At the same time, specific tribal patterns of behavior continue to operate in the domestic sphere in two structures: "a first-order one of the widest level concerning the distribution of power, authority, and economic opportu- nity in the single urban system of relations; and a second-order one of the urban domestic life of individual ethnic groups whose rural home systems of land tenure, marriage, residence and descent have great relevance" (Parkin 1969:192).

GATEKEEPERS AND BROKERS

Gatekeepers, and, especially, brokers, mediate between minority individuals and bureaucratic agencies. Peter Snyder, introducing his data on the gate- keepers of five ethnic neighborhoods in Los Angeles, reviews the considerable cross-cultural literature on the subject and makes a clear distinction between gatekeepers and cultural brokers. Both provide links between members of a local ethnic enclave and the larger society, but the broker has a greater role

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Agenda for the Humanity of Cities 225 as an innovator and mediator between the small subculture and large domi- nant culture. The broker is able to function in both contexts. The gatekeeper is more likely to be a member of the minority ethnic group and facilitates adaptation rather than innovation.
Snyder interviewed Anglos, Arabs, blacks, Chicanos, and Native Americans who had migrated to Los Angeles. The percentages of them who know of gatekeepers in their midst are, respectively, 48, 52, 70, 43, and 61, and actual use of them is, respectively, 10,40,40,30, and 10 0976:43). The main services gatekeepers furnish are locating housing and employment and providing legal, medical, and general advice including economic counseling. The most fre- quently used service is giving medical advice and aid. For example,
Ms. G. was born in a small village near Guadalajara, Mexico, and came to the United States eight years ago. In Mexico she had some training as a nurse's aid and as a midwife. People came to her for medical advice, medical care, and midwifing services. Ms. G. on occasion dispenses store-bought medicines, but usually sends her "clients" to one of two Spanish-speaking doctors who she says are good and will charge only nominal fees. When asked why she does not send people to the local county public health agen- cies and clinics she responds, "They don't like Mexicans there. They give bad treatment. They do not speak Spanish very much and do not explain well to the people what is the matter with them" (p. 46).
Snyder interviewed 18 gatekeepers. They have an average ofl5 gatekeeping contacts a week, and about half of them also have full-time jobs. So gatekeeping involves them in considerable extra work. When asked why they do it, most indicate that they don't know or they want to help their people. While some gatekeepers are busybodies or status-seekers, others are truly altruistic (pp. 46-47).
Bernard Wong's monograph on New York City's Chinatown mentions the increasing activity of cultural brokers in its behal[(l982:97). From a population of 500 in the 1870s, Chinatown now has grown to 75 thousand people, and newcomers continue to arrive, many by way of San Francisco (p. 27). The community is highly organized and has formal associational links with Chinese communities in a number of other North American cities. Its inhab- itants are highly diversified. They include people whose families have been in America for generations and recent refugees from Vietnam, a few upper- class people, and many middle- and working-class ones (p. 35).
Chinese cultural brokers in New York have been motivated by several de- velopments since the 1960s: availability of Affirmative Action and Community Development Program funds, the influence of black and Hispanic ethnic move- ments, and realization that they are still a discriminated-against minority. The brokers have a variety of occupations, but they are well educated, aged 20 to 40, mostly middle-class American born, and living outside Chinatown. Knowledgeable about Chinese and American culture, they are dissatisfied with the traditional leadership structure of Chinatown with its patrons and coteries of poor clients (p. 97).

BUREAUCRATIC SUBCULTURES AND THE uOTHERS"

Whether individual bureaucrats do or can mediate between their institutional rules and perceptions of reality, on the one hand, and their clients, on the other, is a crucial question for the humanity of cities. As yet, there is no



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definitive answer because there is very little reliable information about it, only fragmentary glimpses. One such glimpse is a study of the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) (Pynoos 1986).
Regarding processes of tenant selection, the BHA faced a situation in which "over the years, family public housing has experienced a shift from poor white tenants, either temporarily unemployed or working, to primariLy welfare- dependent minority tenants" (p. 190). This change exacerbated a dilemma: whether to follow the first come-first served rule and thus treat everyone evenhandedly or to break the rules and give priority to applicants in the direst need. John Pynoos is concerned with how a bureaucratic agency wrestled with this dilemma. That it did so is a plus for the humanity of cities.
Nevertheless, gaps in empathy and understanding are enormous, and Lyle Shannon expresses this problem passionately:
Rather than to take the position that the culture of poverty must be accepted as an explanation for the failure of programs supposedly designed for the less fortunate, isn't it just as feasible to conclude that these programs were planned by persons with too little understanding, too little vision, too little scientific knowledge?
[H]ave we really planned for the movement of people from the South and Southwest to urban industrial communities? Have we attempted to help immigrants find a place in the community? Is the middle-class, suburban Welcome Wagon or its equivalent found in the inner city? Are state em- ployment offices, the more or less official arm of the establishment for workers who are in transition. . . , located in imposing edifices, mainly staffed by middle-class, Anglo, English-speaking professionals, or are they decentralized, even decentralized to storefronts adjacent to bars and tav- erns? Are they staffed by persons who have the slightest ability or interest in empathizing with the less fortunate? . . . Is the neighborhood or com- munity school seen as a community center for persons of all ages rather than an institution for children, a place to have them deposited while adult Anglos, both male and female, participate in the exciting world of profes- sional and skilled work? . . . Are ADC [Aid to Dependent Children] mothers seen as prolific leeches on society or as loving, compassionate mothers, who, if given the opportunity to learn, may show us that they are as responsible and as capable of contributing to society as anyone else? (1979: 61).

Agenda for the Humanity of Cities 227 Sitting in a doctor's waiting room, taking a test in a class, waiting on line at an airport, or traveling in the New York subway are usually unpleasant experiences, and most people would agree that crowding makes them even more unpleasant. In contrast, watching a football game or a play, riding on a cable car in San Francisco, spending a day at an amusement park, and attending a cocktail party are pleasant experiences and for most people are made even more exciting and enjoyable when the density of people is fairly high. Crowding intensifies the normal reaction-making a bad ex- perience worse and a good experience better (p. 93).

DISTEMIC SP ACE BEHAVIOR Stressed Behavior and Its Remedies
Jonathan Freedman's landmark book, Crowding and Behavior (1975), refutes some long-held notions, based on experiments with rats and human beings under extremely artificial laboratory conditions, about the evil effects of high- density living. Extrapolations from these findings to everyday life in crowded cities fit neatly into the assumption that cities are inherently unlivable. Freed- man's experiments and observations led him to conclude that
crowding by itself has neither good effects nor bad effects on people but rather serves to intensify the individuals' typical reactions to the situa- tion. . . . Thus, people do not respond to density in a uniform way, they do not find it either always pleasant or always unpleasant. Rather, their re- sponse to density depends almost entirely on their response to the situation itself. Density acts primarily to make this response, whatever it is, stronger (pp. 89-90).

Freedman addresses his situational view of crowding stress to distemic space in New York City. While recognizing (as have others) that having to deal with too many anonymous people can have negative effects, he points out that encouraging interaction among different people is very important in connec- tion with housing design (pp. 123-27). He also points out the vicious circle that fear of danger in distemic space can create. "[S]treets are dangerous. . . not because there are too many people on them, but because there are too few. . . . There is a self-fulfilling prophecy-you are afraid of the streets so you stay off them, so they become dangerous, thus providing a reason to be afraid of them" (pp. 132-33). Freedman makes the same point that Jane Jacobs and Sally Merry do.
Their points are valid, but there are serious problems regarding people's behavior in crowded distemic space. One reason may be that "once crowding is believed to produce stress, it becomes a negative influence and would be expected to have all sorts of bad effects" (Freedman 1975:82), but there seem to be other reasons as well.
Criminal violence aside, public incivility is a serious problem in Western industrial cities, and in all cities of the world (except for the revolutionary industrial ones) as far as vehicular traffic behavior is concerned.
A newspaper column notes Richard Valeri ani's list in the New York Times (Cooper 1985:B-l) of 100 reasons why, "although New York is a swell place to visit, you wouldn't want to live there." The items include some that might well deter visitors: rampant incivility, graffiti, crosstown traffic, honking horns, cabbies and bicycle riders who run red lights, refuse and animal ex- crement on streets and sidewalks, diplomats who double park, obnoxious cops, Central Park after dark, men urinating in public, the subway, box radios, Times Square, potholes, and cabbies who tell you they don't want to take you where you want to go. The tone is humorous, but there is no question that the problems are real, and the distinction between legal and illegal incivility has become blurred. The following excerpts from an article in New York Magazine make the point forcibly:
Civility has begun to collapse just as surely as the city's services and the FDR Drive. Drivers. . . are breezing through red lights as never before. Mass transit passengers, many of them middle class, have suddenly begun smoking in subway trains and on platforms with impunity. . . . Midtown- office-building plazas, once considered an amenity of incentive zoning and a boon to strollers, have been so overrun by vagrants, drunks, and dope dealers that their owners. . . have begun closing them down or fencing them off. . . . The police department's 911 emergency number no longer automatically brings cops. When rookie transit cop Victor Sims broke up an attempted bank robbery. . . last July, the worst resistance he reported



228 THE HUMANITY OF CITIES
came from the 911 operator, who needed five minutes of persuasion to believe that the call was not a joke. Subways are not only twice as late and twice as likely to break down but they seem twice as filthy. . . [and] the decay, stench, and filth that permeate the system are intensifying passenger anger and disgust. . . . Last year, the police issued more than 500,000 sum- monses for such incivilities as leaving garbage cans uncovered, playing loud box radios, obstructing sidewalks, disorderly conduct, unleashed dogs, harassing pedestrians, loitering, and drunkenness. Seven out often people summoned never even bothered to show up in court. Two-thirds of the city's parking violation summonses were also ignored last year. Only 2 percent of the more than 29,000 fines assessed for illegal peddling were actually paid. With fewer people feeling compelled to obey the law, enforcement recedes. Cops turn their backs on petty crimes and misdemeanors. . . . Police and court officials insist that violent and major crimes have to take priority, but the price paid by New Yorkers for trivializing minor crimes has been a tangible coarsening of city life (Pileggi 1981:27-28).

Agenda for the Humanity of Cities 229 of habitual offenders. Why not simply move to the country, taking what can be carried of the great achievements of urban civilization? That's ex- actly the problem. What are the greatest achievements of urban life? Surely one means the rewards of talking to many different kinds of people, the ready presence of uncountable varieties of goods and services, the treasure houses in which both the world's fine art and its popular culture are dis- played and performed, the parks, the institutions of learning and health, the architectural landscape-to take a few samples. They cannot simply be dispersed and yet remain the same. If the city is to be deprived of them by loss of civil peace, love of those same treasures demands that attention, ingenuity, and resources be dedicated to restoring it (p. 60).
Neither Nicholas Pileggi nor Starr is nostalgic for some mythical, nonurban past. On the contrary, both are concerned with vicissitudes, though neither uses the term. They are concerned with on-going urban evolution, using, as it happens, New York City as their example. The points they make and the issues they raise are applicable to other cities as well.
Colin Ward (1978) is also concerned about vicissitudes of urban distemic space. His subject is the adaptation of children to life in cities, in particular British industrial cities which have been suffering negative vicissitudes since World War II. The violence and neglect featured in the lives of many poor urban children come in part from lack of positive adaptations to vicissitudes.
Watch the scrimmage at the bus stop when the city child comes out of school, interview tenants on a housing estate terrorised by its children, learn that the annual cost of vandalism in England, Scotland and Wales is, at a minimum estimate, well over 114 million pounds, or read that one out of every eleven children in the city of Atlanta will be murdered if he or she stays there, and you will be in no doubt that the city has failed its children. It fails to awaken their loyalty and pride. It fails to offer legitimate adventures (p. 203).
Citing a personal conversation with Roger Starr (then housing administrator of New York), Ward shows his awareness that the city does not do anything, but rather the people who inhabit it do things. Starr told Ward that he was mystified by the way urban land values remain high even when the land itself has become derelict (p. 203). Obviously, such land should be reappraised at its real market value, and then it would become available to poor people who can realize their "aspirations for housing at human densities, for domestic and public open space, for low-rent premises for small businesses, and for all those activities which are the very essence of urban civilisation but show a low rate of return on capital invested" (p. 203). Ward discusses many ways in which children's activities that allow them to discover their own skills have been facilitated by using vacant city land. These projects include vegetable gardens and raising chickens for the experience and earning money.
Real involvement in the adult city world is another goal for children on which experiments are being made in Great Britain. For example, a school- teacher in the inner city of Sheffield arranged for her class to visit an unusual house about which they were curious. Visits to the elderly owner and the library revealed that the house was 200 years old and scheduled for demolition to make room for a parking lot. "This distressed the class because they had become involved with the old lady and her husband and because they had come to see that it was valuable to have one building that was in some way

This account comes from an article whose main theme is that the deterio- ration of life in New York City arises to a major degree from the city's budget crisis and its dire effects on all public services. However, Mayor Edward Koch is quoted as saying that the deterioration derives also from the general per- missiveness beginning in the 1960s in which values that did make sense were indiscriminately flouted along with those that did not make sense. Of course, the presence of a large, entrapped, poverty-stricken component of the popu- lation is also a cause, but it does not account for the middle-class misde- meanors. It does seem clear that positive feedback is at work, that a system of behavior is in operation into which no corrective factors are being intro- duced, and therefore the behavior grows and intensifies. If the feedback met- aphor is valid, then the solution begins with introducing corrective factors that induce negative feedback in which the behavior contracts and diminishes. Roger Starr (1985) suggests a strategy focused on crimes committed mostly by members of poor, minority families, but it should be applicable to middle- class misbehavior, too. Starr recommends that each city "must pick the area or activity important to its very life that is most adversely affected by random crime. It must start by attending to that sector. As part of what it does there, however, each city must make basic changes in its police forces, courts and prisons that will help battle crime throughout the city" (p. 25). Starr chooses New York's subway system as an example of such a target sector, and proposes nine priorities for corrective change. Some are very far-reaching, such as "the whole population must support the efforts of leaders in the current crime- prone population to strengthen family structure and educate the young in the mores of an urban society, the better to survive and prosper constructively" (p. 20). Such education seems clearly to be needed, also, among other segments of the population. More specifically, Starr proposes that "the public must see that in the crime target area, no breach of law is so trivial that it can be ignored"(p. 20). Starr ends on this note:
There will be times in the future, as . . . in the past, when the price of the effort to repel the criminal threat to the traditional city will seem too high. People will ask themselves why they should defer more humane uses of public funds. . . to build jail cells, buy advanced technical weapons for the police, and install bigger computers to keep track of the repetitious crimes