Today I just missed a brief lockdown at work as the suspect in a nearby shooting was chased to and caught on the property. One local television outfit is already clearly trying to stir the profit-pot by asking police whether those involved were homeless (the shooting took place at a shelter), and promising a special report asking nearby business owners whether there has been an increase in crime of late. The police report that the victim’s injuries were not life-threatening.

On my walk home, following a different route than usual, I noted how few people I encountered downtown and how few places there were in which to encounter them. Granted that it was four in the afternoon and an overcast and slightly chilly day, nevertheless it seems that building residential high-rises to match the commercial ones has not generated much healthy street life. Narrow and noncommittal sidewalks, insufficient shade (other than the looming shadows cast by said skyscrapers) from the normally brutal sun, the bunker-like and barricaded courthouse – these do not encourage people to walk, let alone linger to chat, busk, have a coffee, read a book, play chess, be true neighbors and good citizens. They might, on the other hand, encourage unhealthy activity to sprout in the interstices.

On my mind are also

· The recent terrorist attacks and the climate conference just begun in Paris, and the ban on public assembly imposed in the meantime: can we honestly condemn the violence of the textbook terrorist without accounting for the destruction of people, societies, and the natural world wrought by powerful governments and now even more powerful corporations?

· The debates currently raging concerning the movement of people into and about Europe and the US, and a short film following Syrian refugees who walked from Budapest to the Austrian border: as I have often thought when reading about the enviable excursions of the Clerk of Oxford, there are not many places in the US, I should think, where is it both safe and legal to travel any great distance on foot.

· The American police and legal system’s egregious distance from and distrust of particularly African American citizens who choose (or have no choice but) to use or make their own public spaces, and the curfews imposed upon young people in very many places, which, along with compulsory schooling, mean that youth may have little opportunity to engage healthily and legally with the physical and social settings of the cities in which they live.

· The contrast between the attitudes of two otherwise not dissimilar local parishes of my acquaintance toward the down-and-out: one, in a suburban wasteland where there is not much foot traffic, feeds those in need but otherwise keeps them at a distance, with the church locked to minimize ‘problems’ with ‘vagrants’; the other, in an area with a much greater pedestrian presence, locks its office but not the church itself – though the church still has few people dropping in to pray or rest. Percy Dearmer was right to say that the best way to keep a church safe is to keep it in constant use. The same goes for any public space.

I could go on at some length. My point is that we think an automobile, a wall, a checkpoint, a curfew will protect us from violent attack – and perhaps in the immediate instance it may. But both cities and societies are remarkably like natural systems, I think, and as with any intervention meant to control nature (floods, for example), the long-term result of constraints upon our ability to move about and come together is only to make the inevitable backlash worse.

Urban planning cannot solve all of society’s problems. But the physical and social spaces and patterns that help to overcome, rather than helping to reinforce, our isolation from one another and from the natural world are interconnected, and it is only by coming together in them that we have any hope of ‘re-humanizing’ ourselves and one another, of building a more open, more just, and thus more peaceful, society, of living in harmony with one another and the rest of the inhabitants of this fragile world.

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