When in doubt, go back to Jane

The basic argument the famous Jane Jacobs* laid out for urban safety is this: crime doesn’t occur with (known) witnesses watching the street; witnesses come along with activity on and around the street; activity comes along with lots of different stuff going on at varied hours. Ergo, single-use zoning is deadly.

In her words:

The basic requisite for [safety on the streets] is a substantial quantity of stores and other public places sprinkled along the sidewalks of a district; enterprises and public places that are used by evening and night must be among them especially. Stores, bars and restaurants, as the chief examples, work in several different and complex ways to abet sidewalk safety.
First, they give people – both residents and strangers – concrete reasons for using the sidewalks on which these enterprises face.

Second, they draw people along the sidewalks past places which have no attractions to public use in themselves but which become traveled and peopled as routes to somewhere else; this influence does not carry very far geographically, so enterprises must be frequent in a city district if they are to populate with walkers those other stretches of street that lack public places along the sidewalk. Moreover, there should be many different kinds of enterprises, to give people reasons for crisscrossing paths.

Third, storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of peace and order themselves; they hate broken windows and holdups; they hate having customers made nervous about safety. They are great street watchers and sidewalk guardians if present in sufficient numbers.

Fourth, the activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for food or drink, is itself an attraction to still other people.

This last point, that the sight of people attracts still other people, is something that city planners and city architectural designers seems to find incomprehensible. – Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961

This is the basic tenant of urbanism (at least with regard to safety.) The question in critique is this:

Is the idea of the active, multi-use pedestrian street still viable in the current economic environment in more than a few specialized places? [See here] Is this still a viable model for the average person in the average place?