Michael Moynihan: Kids on the streets is a sign of a thriving city

A city that can safely be navigated by children is a city that welcomes everyone, writes Michael Moynihan

If we’re serious about getting people to live in the city - to thrive in the city - surely we should be proactive in doing so, and making the city a place that’s attractive to kids. File photo: iStock

In the end, or maybe the beginning, everyone who writes about life in the city ends up writing about Jane Jacobs, the activist and theorist whose work has become synonymous with urban issues like gentrification and preservation, renewal and regeneration.

The title of her breakthrough work in the early nineteen-sixties, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, provides a neat summary of her views. At the time it offered a sharp rejection of the notion of sweeping destructive urban clearance as progressive: Jacobs argued in favour of maintaining existing communities and neighbourhoods instead.