The development of this sort of community self-monitoring is most likely to emerge, she argued, in neighborhoods with a rich mixture of activities taking place in buildings of varying age, character, and use. For the most part, social science research has vindicated Jacobs’s perspective.
For example, sociologists studying community resilience in the wake of natural disasters mapped deaths caused by an extreme heat wave in Chicago in 1995.5 They found, not surprisingly, that death rates were higher in poor areas where air conditioners were scarce.