It is a truly dreadful thing for anyone, me for instance, to lay on you anything as hackneyed as: a picture is worth a thousand words. But let me show you a couple of pictures and leave it to you to draw your own conclusions. The topic is the first round of reactions to our ongoing 2012 collaborative project aiming at clarifying the concept of Safe Streets from a strategic planning and policy perspective. The project was announced on 2 January and a website was set up at http://safestreetstrategies.wordpress.com/, along with a Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/SafeStreetStrategies and Twitter at https://twitter.com/#!/safestreets2012. We had of course zero readers at that point.
Four weeks later the site is being followed by 1,067 people (as of this morning), so it would seem we have hit a nerve here. While our world wide reader map this morning looks like this (this map reports the last eighty hits on the site):
No great surprises the initial interest coming in from West Europe, the Americas and the other countries expressing their at least curiosity, but what about that huge clump of interest coming in from India. If we zoom, it looks like this.
This is certainly encouraging news from the world’s largest and if often the most raucous democracy and harbors well for the future — no matter how hard it is proving to actually bring this concern and the knowledge behind it into the front line of the actual policy, decision and investment process which, sadly, continues to carry on for the most part with egregiously and continually disproved outmoded thinking and decisions. The trick of course is to bring these more thoughtful and informed people and groups into the front line of the discussions and eventual solution process.
And now for the bad news:
This last map, this last picture tells the sad story of more than one billion people who use their streets but all too often without the support thoughtful government policy. And the only question that comes to mind in this context is simply this: Who is minding the store?
Plenty of work yet to do, eh?
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NETWORK DISPATCHES 