Brooklyn is having a moment. And it’s a noisy one. Developers and politicians are trying to shape the future of this borough – and they want it their way. Many, many people are working hard not to let that happen. Without a fight, anyway.

To me, this feels like the beginning of an urban movement; a citizens uprising in the name of livable cities. Cities that don’t just cater to the rich but honor human values, scale, greenery, and thoughtful architecture.

Coney Island, Red Hook, the North Brooklyn waterfront, Kensington, the Atlantic Yards:  they’re  all up for grabs and if Brooklyn could talk she would probably scream: "Wait a minute!" But since she can’t speak: her faithful citizens are screaming for her.

Which isn’t to say that Brooklyn doesn’t need development and investment. There are vast stretches of Brooklyn that are crying for intensive TLC. The Atlantic Yards is surely one of them. But the developer’s schemes don’t often have the hearts of the borough at heart.

Why should we put our neighborhood in the hands of the guy who brought us the unbearable Atlantic Center. And as an encore, created the Atlantic Terminal Mall, which is quite a bit better. And it does sort of hide the Atlantic Center, which is a good thing. I know I’m not the only one who enjoys the convenience of having a Target Store there.

Brooklyn is having a moment the likes of which I haven’t seen since I moved here in 1991. All of a sudden it’s the it-borough: Manhattan is expanding eastward and the land grab of 2005 is a veritible gold rush.

But there’s also a whole lot of shoutin’ going on. People are organizing and blogging and demonstrating and talking and petitioning and yelling and writing and speech making and thinking  and…

You get the idea.

This is fighting the good fight Brooklyn style. And like Brooklyn, it’s smart and scrappy, down to earth, spunky and ambitious. It’s gotta be. Development on this scale represents big money, big politics, big corporations, and in some cases, big bad guys. It’s a tough fight to fight. But with the help of the activists, the urban historians, the humanistic theorists, the gurus of smart development, maybe, just maybe, some visionary plans can get generated and put to the test.

Francis Morrone, who writes the About New York column for The New York Sun and is the author of An Architectural Guidebook to Brooklyn, has studied Brooklyn for many years had this to say in The Brooklynite: "The Atlantic Yards area needs development. The proposals on the table, however, beg the question of whether Brooklyns’ urban success stories have taught us anything at all, or just paved the way for thoughtless mega-development. Jane Jacobs coined the phrase "cataclysmic money."  Disinvestment is bad. So is over-investment. And it seems that in some parts of Brooklyn we may be going from the one to the other."

I wonder what would happen if the developers and politicians took a long, hard look at the Brooklyn they seek to transform. What if they were to truly explore Brooklyn’s livable streets. Maybe then they would begin to understand the meaning of scale, beauty and livability. Morrone continues:

"Brooklyn neighborhoods have succeeded because they retain a scale and a style from an age when city development reached a stage of optimal habitability. Such neighborhoods are exceedingly hard to find in urban America today. These Brooklyn neighborhoods are not only a New York treasure but a national treasure of preserved, human-scale places."

Human scale – what a concept! What if developers sought to enhance human scale rather than destroy it. What if developers decided to learn from these communities rather than try to overwhelm them with profit-making schemes that add little to the urban experience.

The scariest part of what’s going on is that it feels like the wrong people are making the decisions. Morrone shows how short term thinking could destroy some of the most remarkable neighborhoods in America.

"Developing their interstices with mega-projects like the Atlantic Yards proposal would destroy the scale of neighborhoods that would, as a result, be edged and hemmed by phalanxes of outsize buildings," writes Morrone. "Only the crudest short-term cost accounting could possibly justify playing so fast and loose with these treasures of comely urban form."

The silver lining of what’s going on is that people are actually talking about urban design and planning. Architecture is on everyone’s lips. People are devising alternate plans,  getting organized, and making themselves heard. They are quoting Jane Jacobs and other great urbanists. The discussion is sometimes angry and intense. But democracies are often messy and loud.

It’s the sound of people not taking things sitting down.

Note: The log cabin playhouse in Hugh Crawford’s Daily Pix is in the pre-school playground in the lot next to Union Temple. That lot will soon make way for Richard Meier’s luxury glass high rise.