Jane Jacobs in Mirjevo: The Pavement That No Longer Watches the Neighbourhood

In Mirjevo, on the block where I lived while my son was in primary school, I had occasion to visit an old neighbour around ten days ago. She is now eighty-one, lives alone; her husband died three years ago. After lunch I suggested we go for a walk.

We stepped out into the street. It was around five in the afternoon, the hour when on that pavement a complex social life used to unfold. Older people sat on benches. Children ran on the slabs. Mothers chatted from the steps of the buildings. Pensioners walked their dogs with pauses for conversation.

We stopped and looked around. It was a Wednesday, it was not raining, there was no reason for anyone not to be outside. But there was nobody on the pavement. Not one person. Not one child. Not one dog. The pavement was empty, and cars were parked on the strip that had once been the sidewalk for pedestrians.

The neighbour said, with the same calm with which she had earlier spoken about her medication and her grandchildren: “Twenty years ago we could not have passed through here for the people. Now I do not know who lives in the next stairwell. We have all locked ourselves into our flats.”

A pivot to Jane Jacobs

I pivot to the sociology of urban everyday life as understood by the American author Jane Jacobs, in the book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” (Random House, 1961; Serbian translation, Mediterran Publishing, 2011). In that book Jacobs developed a thesis often cited today but more rarely understood:

The first thing to understand is that the public peace of city streets and pavements is not kept primarily by the police, however necessary the police may be. It is kept by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, enforced by the people themselves.

Jacobs rejected the modernist planning idea that the safety of the city is built by moving people off the street, by opening parks of greenery without people, by separating buildings from the pavement. She argued the opposite: the safety of the street rests on the fact that people are on the street.

She called this the eyes of the street. The shopkeeper who has a store on the ground floor and watches all day who passes. The pensioner sitting in front of the entrance. The mother who shouts from the window for her child to come to dinner. The waiter at the cafe who occasionally glances at the pavement.

All those eyes together, a system of continuous presence, are what makes the street safe. Not the police, not the cameras, not the fences.

What disappeared from the Belgrade block

In Mirjevo in 2026, those eyes are no longer there. Not because people have gone, but because the activities that brought them onto the pavement have gradually moved elsewhere.

Sociologically, this is a disappearance that happened through several parallel changes:

• ground-floor shops have closed or been turned into delivery-company storerooms
• benches in front of entrances have been removed because they “attracted teenagers”
• older residents have moved from balconies into closed flats because of heating and air conditioning
• children have moved from the pavement to organised lessons, football schools, screens at home
• mothers have stopped shouting from the windows because their kitchens face the other side
• waiters at cafes work more and more in the inside rooms instead of on the terrace

Each of these changes is understandable in isolation. Taken together, they mean the pavement has fewer eyes watching over it. Fewer eyes mean less safety. Less safety means less reason for anyone to step out. Less stepping out means still fewer eyes. The circle closes on its own, without anyone wishing to close it.

The counter-argument about changed times

Here comes a counter-argument familiar in Serbian debates about the city. By that logic, people are no longer on the pavement because they are busy. They live faster, work longer, have less time for sitting around for free. Life has become more demanding, so naturally the way of spending free time has changed.

The argument has partial truth, because the Serbian working day really has lengthened over the past twenty years. Media also document that average working hours in Serbia exceed those in Italy or France by several hours a week. Time for the neighbours really has shrunk.

But the argument is only half right. Pensioners who sit in the flat all day do not have a time problem. Mothers on maternity leave do not have a time problem. Children after school do not have a time problem. The change is not only a function of speed but of the loss of recognition of the pavement as a place worth spending time on.

Jane Jacobs would say, as in her well-known chapter “The Uses of Primary Uses,” that the loss of the activities that were primary to the pavement is the most important cause. The pavement today is the space between cars and entrances, not a space with a purpose.

Back to my neighbour

I return to my neighbour in Mirjevo. After our walk, which lasted perhaps twenty minutes and during which we did not pass a single other pedestrian, we sat on the bench in front of the building. The bench was empty, with the remains of flowers someone, probably she, sometimes brought.

I asked her carefully whether she missed anything. I was thinking of her husband, of the grandchildren who had left, of former neighbours. After a long silence she answered:

Most of all I miss having someone to watch go by. That is something a person cannot say when they are young. But when you grow old, watching people pass is more than half of life.

I stayed silent. The conversation could have ended there, because her statement was complete. She had described exactly what Jane Jacobs in the sixties called the sidewalk ballet. The light choreography of meetings, greetings, brief exchanges that, seen from the window of an eighty-year-old woman, makes the difference between a life one endures and a life with meaning.

The question I leave, which I share with those who read to the end, runs roughly like this. What are we building when we build a city without pavements that watch each other. And, the harder sociological question, do the planners who design the new blocks know that a sidewalk without eyes is no sidewalk at all, but only a surface layer between the car park and the door.