The Tribe on My Street
A city's safety depends on more than its streets, surveillance cameras, or police patrols. It is also built through everyday relationships, shared spaces, and the ability of its residents to shape the places they inhabit.
One of the loveliest moments of my day comes early in the morning, when I step outside with my son. The spring air is still cool, but we seek out the sunny side of the street, and our bodies fill with that fresh energy we feel when we wake up early on vacation and head out for a walk. We walk two blocks hand in hand to his preschool.
Along this short stretch, a familiar choreography unfolds. The caretaker of the building on Terrero Street, hosing down the sidewalk; Néstor, who greets us with a huge smile and a shout of “Hi, Lolo!” as he opens his hardware store at 8:45 a.m.—a business that has been around longer than I have; the man who walks his dog at the same steady pace every morning; and the street sweeper who wishes us a good day. Sometimes we run into Joaquín and his mother, whom we first met at the park before discovering that we were neighbors.
When I drop him off at preschool, I am moved to see the network of relationships my son is already weaving at such a young age. His friends, their families, his teachers, and the older children at school, who walk past and greet him with high-fives.
A few minutes later, as I continue alone toward work and cross the avenue, I often find myself wondering: Why does walking those few blocks bring me such peace? Why do I feel at home when I am outside?
The Structure of the Sidewalk
Part of the answer lies in the city's physical form. On those sidewalks, at those hours, things are happening. There are reasons to be out on the street: shops opening, school bells ringing, people heading to work. There is no shortage of reasons to move through and spend time in public space.
Jane Jacobs gave this phenomenon a very precise name in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities, “eyes on the street.” She was not referring to installing surveillance cameras or filling street corners with police officers, but rather to the spontaneous, everyday attentiveness that emerges when a sidewalk has a life of its own. The building caretaker, Néstor, the street sweeper, and the man walking his dog are all there for entirely different reasons, but their presence means that public space is not a deserted landscape a woman must cross alone.
What makes a street come alive? It is something that must be built, sustained, and maintained. A diversity of uses matters—homes, shops, schools, gathering places—because they bring people into the street at different times of day. It matters that pedestrian routes are continuous, that crossings are easy to navigate, and that an avenue, railway line, or highway does not become a barrier that is difficult to overcome.
When we analyze urban environments from a technical perspective—for example, the areas surrounding schools—we can examine these conditions through specific dimensions: access to public transportation, pedestrian routes, safety, physical barriers that interrupt or fragment the urban fabric, and the number of shops and community support facilities. All of these factors help us understand which material conditions facilitate or restrict the everyday movements of children and those who accompany them.
And what happens when we think about a woman walking alone at night? The freedom to move also depends on the time of day, who is making the journey, and the relationships that exist within that space. A busy street is not necessarily a safe street, but a diversity of activities, uses, and people can help create the conditions for those who inhabit it to encounter one another, recognize one another, and look out for one another.
Yet a map of physical conditions can tell us a great deal, but not everything. The map is not the territory. It may show a hardware store with a storefront facing the street, but it cannot capture the fact that Néstor greets us every morning. It may indicate where a public transportation stop or a healthcare center is located, but it cannot tell us whom a woman would turn to if she felt unsafe on her way home.
The physical structure of the city is part of the answer. To fully understand why I feel at home when I am outside, I need to look beyond the street itself and understand the relationships among those who inhabit it.
Weaving Care Against Isolation
Knowing the people who inhabit a street does not eliminate risks, but it changes the way we move through a neighborhood and how we shape it. During a workshop on mapping school environments, one family shared that, before their ten-year-old son began walking home from school on his own, they explored the neighborhood together and chose a trusted shop on each block. They went inside, introduced themselves, and reached an understanding with the people running those businesses. Learning the route also meant learning whom he could count on along the way.
This experience shows that care does not depend solely on the physical conditions of a street or the individual decisions of those who use it. It is also built through relationships of trust, mutual recognition, and shared responsibility.
Yet we live in an era marked by isolation and individual responses to collective problems, a tendency that the pandemic and its aftermath helped deepen. Faced with insecurity, many of the solutions offered involve locking ourselves indoors, viewing the world through a screen, or minimizing the need to go outside and interact with others.
As we retreat into ourselves, our shared social life gradually weakens. We begin to believe that care is either a commodity we pay for or a burden that women must shoulder behind closed doors, alone. We forget that care is also an active social bond, woven day by day and sustained within the places we inhabit.
This does not mean that community networks can replace the responsibilities of the state or solve problems of insecurity on their own. It means recognizing that relationships among people who share a neighborhood are also part of what makes it possible to inhabit that space freely.
Counter-Hegemonic Cartography
At school, we learned to read maps as objective representations of space, technical tools used to locate places, trace routes, and define borders. Yet maps are not neutral. Behind every representation lie decisions about what to show, what to leave out, and what information to consider relevant.
Territory is not merely a surface on which streets, buildings, and green spaces are distributed. It is also a social construction shaped by power relations, conflicts, memories, and experiences. Maps represent that reality, but they can also intervene in it.
That is why, when grassroots organizations recognize that they possess valuable knowledge about the places they inhabit, cartography can become a counter-hegemonic tool. It is no longer simply a matter of representing territory from a technical or institutional perspective, but of incorporating the experiences of those who move through it, use it, and transform it every day.
French geographer Yves Lacoste helped challenge the supposed neutrality of geographical knowledge and highlighted its political dimension. Thinking about space also means understanding the power relations that organize it and the possibilities for intervening in them.
Participatory mapping puts this perspective into practice. These are opportunities to sit down with neighbors, children, and community organizations and bring lived experience, memory, and knowledge of place onto paper, transforming personal experiences into a shared assessment.
When children and adults mark on a map where they feel protected, which street corners they avoid, or what spaces they need in order to play, they transform private warnings and individual fears into a collective voice. They cease to be mere observers and begin to make shared claims about how they want to inhabit their neighborhood.
At the Cambalache Geographic Cooperative, we seek to take this process one step further by combining these stories and drawings with the methodological rigor of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). We digitize these layers of lived experience so that knowledge produced by communities can enter into dialogue with official, technical, and institutional information.
A school route that statistics classify as accessible may present obstacles known only to those who travel it every day. A park may appear as a green space in public records yet be perceived as unsafe by neighborhood families. A street corner may seem insignificant on a map while serving as an essential place of gathering and mutual care for local residents.
Incorporating this knowledge makes it possible to develop more comprehensive assessments and substantiate demands concerning the conditions of public space. The map ceases to be exclusively an instrument of representation or control imposed from outside and can become a tool for community organizing: a document that makes problems visible, identifies resources, and gives collective demands a geographical reference. Knowing our own territory, producing information about it, and sharing that knowledge is also a way of defending it.
Against Disillusionment and Neglect: Our Right to the City
When the state fails to guarantee rights and sustain comprehensive public policies, public space does not simply become empty. Conditions of neglect and inequality can facilitate the expansion of different forms of violence and territorial control.
In many neighborhoods, criminal organizations exploit these conditions to impose rules, control economic activities, restrict people's freedom of movement, and establish mechanisms of intimidation. Sometimes, this domination takes the form of visible violence. At other times, it operates through threats, silence, and boundaries that residents learn to recognize without their ever being written down.
But organized crime does not thrive only where the state is absent. It can also develop through corruption, institutional complicity, and relationships with economic actors that facilitate criminal activities. That is why restoring communities' ability to inhabit their neighborhoods requires much more than increasing police presence.
The criminal appropriation of public space affects the everyday lives of those who inhabit it. A street may still have open shops, people passing through, and neighbors who know one another, but the relationships that once encouraged social interaction may also become shaped by fear and surveillance imposed by other actors. The presence of people, by itself, does not guarantee safety. What also matters is who sets the rules, who can move freely, and who has the power to decide how space is used.
There is also another process of withdrawal, less visible but equally significant: that of a city increasingly planned around real estate speculation, rapid circulation, and economic profitability, where spaces for social interaction lose ground to market demands.
In both cases, although through different mechanisms, opportunities for the collective appropriation of urban space are restricted.
Silvia Federici, in her reflections on the construction of the commons and the need to re-enchant the world, proposes recovering forms of social organization capable of confronting the commodification of life and rebuilding community ties. From this perspective, care cannot be reduced to an individual responsibility or a service that is bought and sold. It also requires spaces, resources, and relationships sustained collectively.
In response to insecurity, state policies often focus on increasing surveillance, installing cameras, or deploying additional police forces. These interventions may serve specific prevention and protection purposes, but they remain insufficient unless accompanied by policies capable of transforming the social and urban conditions that foster violence and exclusion.
Safety is built not only through territorial control, but also by ensuring that residents can exercise their rights within that territory. This requires a state that is actively present, capable of investigating and confronting criminal activities, but also of guaranteeing basic infrastructure, accessible public spaces, services, opportunities, and conditions that support community life. It is not a matter of choosing between safety and care. Rather, it is about understanding that a security policy that ignores social relationships and the material conditions of neighborhoods is unlikely to provide sustainable solutions.
Exercising the right to the city, originally formulated by Henri Lefebvre and later developed by David Harvey, means much more than having individual access to the resources urban life offers. It means recognizing the collective capacity of those who inhabit a city to participate in shaping its organization and transforming it. That right demands concrete political decisions.
Urban design must take into account the diversity of the people who inhabit a neighborhood. Streets cannot be reduced to corridors for traffic; they must also provide places to linger, meet, and socialize. Sometimes, this begins with something as simple as installing benches along a sidewalk, ensuring adequate lighting, or creating accessible pedestrian routes.
Existing community networks must also be recognized and strengthened. Safe routes to school, trusted neighborhood shops, and local organizations can become part of public policies that promote collective care, without shifting responsibilities that belong to the state onto communities.
Finally, the participation of those who inhabit these neighborhoods must become more than a merely consultative exercise. Children, women, people of diverse gender identities, and the wider public need effective channels through which they can contribute to the assessment, planning, and transformation of their neighborhoods.
Those who move through a city every day are familiar with problems, needs, and possibilities that often do not appear in technical records. Incorporating this knowledge does not mean abandoning specialized expertise, but recognizing that urban planning can be enriched when it is developed collectively.
We need to spread the word that we have a right to the city. A right that goes beyond using its streets, parks, and services to include the possibility of deciding how we want to live in it. It means learning to see the street again, not merely as a threat from which we must protect ourselves, but as a shared territory where we can meet, care for one another, and organize to transform our living conditions.
When I return from work, I cross the avenue once again and walk those same two blocks. They are no longer just my morning route; they have also become a small measure of the city I want to live in.
Not because there are no risks there, or because social bonds alone can solve everything, but because those sidewalks hold the possibility of coming together and caring for one another.
Perhaps the tribe on my street does not need to write its message on a wall. It writes it, day after day, in the greetings exchanged, the doors that open, and the places where we are free to stay.
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