Chapter 7 immigration and Social Disorder

If there is one thing that social scientists have learned since the 1960s and then succeeded in passing on to the wider society, it is the importance of the mundane, informal relations of daily life for the healthy functioning of our neighborhoods and institutions. Back in 1961, when urban planners were still buoyed by a professional hubris sustained by the arrogant abstractions of postwar modernism, Jane Jacobs wrote: "The first thing to understand is that the public peace. . . of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police cre. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves. . . . No amount of police can enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down."' Twenty years later James Q. Wilson and George Kelling were teaching the same lesson through the example of "broken windows." Immigration and Social Disorder 125