In New York City, Mayor Rudy Giuliani's popularity is heavily dependent on his success in dramatically reducing crime through a classic and systematic application of community policing strategies.

In Denver, the even more popular Mayor Wellington Webb has made converting abandoned, ill-used, or environmentally degraded city land into "open spaces" for use as parks and other recreational facilities a signature initiative.

In each city, the conventional approach to measuring Hizzoner's success is by looking at indicators like crime rates and park acreage. But in both cases, something much more important is going on.

In New York and in Denver, and in many other cities, citizens are beginning to reclaim public spaces. They are beginning to rediscover what drew millions of Americans to cities to begin with, aside from economic necessity: the ability to come together to work, play, study, hurry about, stroll, and loaf in a word, live in a genuine community drawn from highly diverse backgrounds.

Public spaces parks, neighborhood streets, schoolyards, public transit, sports facilities, downtown and uptown commercial and retail areas are the great symbols of urban community life. Their abandonment over the years to crime, disorder, moral decay, pollution, fear, and hopelessness, have been the great symptoms of urban decline.

When New Yorkers can again ride the subway and walk through Times Square without feeling as though they have landed on a hostile, alien planet, the quality of life of New York goes up in ways no crime statistics can adequately measure. And when citizens of Denver can commune with owls, foxes, hawks, and pelicans in a twenty-five acre urban wildlife preserve, Heron Pond, the fear of over-development that has so divided metro Denver residents by date of arrival goes down a few notches, with civic implications beyond measure.

So: we recommend that in every American city, public- and private-sector leaders focus not just on the usual statistics of urban well-being, but on the measurement that most reflects overall civic health. How many "public spaces" are available, and how many citizens use them?