The 60-year-old book that can help cities reduce gun violence

Boston Globe

28-04-2025

What are the conventional wisdoms that have gotten us into this mess?
The conventional wisdom of the left views gun violence as being largely about guns. The best available data suggests there is truth to this view: If there were some way to disappear the 400 million guns in America (a country of 330 million people), murders would decline substantially. But we can all see what the politics of gun control look like, especially at the national level.
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The left also tends to see gun violence as due to bad economic conditions, driven by desperate people doing whatever it takes to feed their families. But ending the big 'root causes' of these conditions — such as poverty, segregation, social isolation — is complicated, leading to a sense that gun violence is 'too big to fix.'
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The conventional wisdom on the right says gun violence is due to intrinsically bad people who are unafraid of the criminal justice system. That's led to policies that try to disincentivize gun violence with the threat of ever-longer prison sentences. The result of following this approach has been the highest incarceration rate of any nation and a murder rate unheard of in any other rich country.
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We have the worst of all worlds. So what should we do? We should look back to Jane Jacobs's 1961 book 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities.'
Jacobs noticed that within her home city of New York, similarly poor areas wound up having dramatically different levels of violence. That means gun violence isn't determined purely by root causes like poverty. It also means gun violence can't be due just to people's moral character (surely that doesn't vary by neighborhood) or to the criminal justice system or gun laws (since those are the same everywhere within the same city).
What does make a difference? Jacobs argued that similarly poor neighborhoods had such different levels of violence in large part because they differed in the degree to which they had residents out and about, and willing to step in to interrupt trouble before it escalated. She called this 'eyes on the street.'
Jane Jacobs in the 2016 documentary film "Citizen Jane: Battle for the City."
Courtesy of IFC Films
Notice that conventional wisdom suggests eyes on the street should be largely irrelevant to violence. The left and the right implicitly share the core assumption that before anyone ever pulls a trigger, they engage in some deliberate weighing of the pros and cons. Conventional wisdom suggests violence interrupted is merely violence delayed.
But conventional wisdom misunderstands what most shootings are. Most shootings start with words — arguments that escalate and end in tragedy because someone has a gun.
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Whatever people are doing in the middle of a heated argument, it's most definitely not a careful, deliberate weighing of pros and cons. In those moments, most of us are instead acting emotionally, almost automatically.
This connects to an important lesson from behavioral economics, as summarized in the wonderful book 'Thinking, Fast and Slow,' by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman. All of us engage in two types of cognition, but we're only aware of one. The 'voice in our head' that we usually think of as 'thinking' can indeed be rational, deliberate, and calculating. Kahneman calls it 'system 2.' But that type of thinking is slow. So our minds also carry out a different type of thinking — 'system 1' — that happens below the level of consciousness. It's a set of automatic responses designed to work well for routine, low-stakes things we encounter daily, but it can get us into big trouble in high-stakes situations — as when a gun is present.
This is why eyes on the street are so important: System 1 motivation for gun violence is fleeting. In other words, violence interrupted is usually violence prevented. Many rigorous studies support this view.
Anything that gets more eyes on the street reduces violence. That's why police walking the streets prevent violent crime. They don't just make arrests but also interrupt violence. The same is true of private security guards in a neighborhood.
But critically, having eyes on the street is also about things we don't normally associate with gun violence prevention at all. It means we need to ensure that poor neighborhoods have stores that draw people out of their homes. We need to clean up abandoned lots to make inviting places for people to spend time. We need to ensure public areas are well lit.
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These may seem like small things — distractions from what conventional wisdom has been arguing for. But the data suggests each of these urban planning policies can have impacts on violence that are remarkably large — reductions of 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent.
When taken together, these measures accumulate into massive, almost transformative differences. For example, on the South Side of Chicago, where I live, there are two adjoining neighborhoods — Greater Grand Crossing and South Shore — with nearly identical levels of poverty and similar demographics. They are governed by the same gun laws and criminal justice system. What's different is that South Shore has fewer vacant lots, less disorder (like graffiti) that discourages people from coming outside, and 50 percent more land devoted to stores and other commercial uses. And on a per capita basis, shootings are just half as common in South Shore as in Greater Grand Crossing.
Solving the problem of gun violence in America will require us to see more clearly what it is and what causes it. That points to surprising solutions — including the vital importance of urban planning. Urban planning is all about shaping the figurative health of our communities. But it also turns out to be vitally important for ensuring the literal health of our communities. Jane Jacobs can show us how.