This is hardly the argument we would expect Nehemiah to use to incentivize the people to build! An argument as urban security and safety for their families would (we would think) activate the people far more than a reference to derision. That would be the more so since none of Nehemiah’s addressees had ever experienced the existence of the wall and so had grown up comfortable with this derision.
17 Then I said to them, “You see the trouble we are in, how Jerusalem lies in ruins with its gates burned. Come, let us build the wall of Jerusalem, that we may no longer suffer derision.”