Reclaim the Night / Take Back the Night

In response to Reclaim the Night / Take Back the Night by betenoire:

Marching to Freedom (excerpts):

In 1977, when the first Reclaim the Night march was held in Leeds, I was just 15 and remember watching it on the news with a growing sense of excitement and political conviction. The Yorkshire Ripper was still terrorising the north of England and the police had been advising that, to avoid attack, women should stay inside after dark. The march responded directly to this warning (placards read "No curfew on women - curfew on men") and hundreds of women shouted about their anger at being kept off the streets - the supposedly public highways, after all - by the threat of male violence. Marches occurred simultaneously in 12 English locations, from Manchester to Soho. 

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The latest incarnation of this (actually conceived 16 years prior to Reclaim the Night) is Jane Jacobs's "Eyes on the Street":

There must be eyes on the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind. The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce a sufficient number of people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks. [Emphasis added.]

http://www.cooltownstudios.com/mt/archives/000572.html

It is not enough to reserve one day a year to march in protest, and then spend the rest of the year hiding from our neighbors in back yards and buildings, shuttling from one enclosed structure to another in climate controlled automobiles. If we want safe streets, we need to be on those streets, own those streets, every night and every day, and design our neighborhoods and the architecture of those neighborhoods to promote such use of the streets.

The self-imposed, self-selected curfew, where citizens shackle themselves and their families with television, imprison themselves in automotive confinement, and sequester themselves in fenced-off back yards, creates the very conditions that breed unsafe streets. The night can only be successfully taken back if we each assert ownership of our own communities through consistent and continuous engagement with and participation in those communities.

Having 'Eyes on the Street' obviates the need to take back the night each and every year, for it will not have been ceded in the first place.

The Walking Enthusiast Test