Death and Life: sidewalk relations
Every Saturday until the end of April, we will be blogging along with the City-Builders Book Club through Jane Jacobs’ 1961 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Feel free to read along and join the conversation as we consider how Jacobs’ observations might hold up 75 years from now.
A future streetscape revolves around a moving sidewalk, pictured in a 1980 issue of Scientific American. via paleofuture
In the first two substantial chapters (2 & 3), Jacobs discusses the use and integration of sidewalks into neighbourhoods so as to promote both safety and social livelihood. She outlines the way that most ideas of the level of safety offered by a certain city rests upon a visitor’s initial experience walking the city’s streets . Jacobs’ measure for safety in this case is whether one feels safe among strangers on a sidewalk, for, as she says, “Cities are, by definition, full of strangers.” This brings us to a question that we have laid out at most of our consultations: How does one design a public space that encourages strangers to be friends? How can we blur the boundaries between the familiar and the strange in a way that encourages discovery without sacrificing security and consent?
Reading this passage, it becomes clear that the step we’ve missed is one Jacobs was well-attuned to: “When you see the same stranger on [a successful street] you begin to nod.” Successful sidewalks - according to her measure, those which have each of the following: 1. Clear division of public and private space; 2. Eyes on the street; 3. A heavy and constant flow of traffic - make strangers into acquaintances. Acquaintanceship is as far as good design can take us; it is then up to us to introduce more profound social bonds which serve as the glue that links the community to its built environment. Similarly, Jacobs’ notion of street characters, ranging from buskers to talkative shopkeepers, is one that sheds light on the way that human presence animates and socializes street space.
One of her main complaints in these chapters is that architects and planners don’t understand that the presence of people attracts others. Arguably, since the time she wrote (and arguably still, because she wrote) designers have tuned their ears to the murmurs and trepidations of the life of public spaces. Design has adopted a level of organicism and interaction that pleads for strangers to bump paths. Undulating wooden decks along Toronto’s waterfront take people out of their ordinary experience of walking along the water and into a situation where they sign a silent contract to let go of inhibitions the minute they enter the space.
One last, especially resonant thought here is that sidewalks only exist in relation to the blocks and streets that they serve to outline. They are an “abstraction,” says Jacobs, which in our case implies that no matter what it is that fills the gaps between our bedrooms and the rest of the city, be it concrete sidewalks, a system of moving buildings, a large nature reserve, or a multi-modal transit network (all suggested at past Upper Toronto consultations); it should invite an engaged, playful, and watchful eye as well as some feeling of permanency that encourages residents to adopt it as their own.
A way we can update Jacobs’ thoughts here is to begin to look into how these concepts might play out on a more expansive scale—how, for a city of hyper-mobile residents, each person’s subjective streetscape, traced from her daily journey through the city, might be made more engaging. Additionally, Jacobs speaks of the way high-income residential complexes essentially hire eyes on the street. How might this translate to a future of increased automated surveillance? All reservations aside, could artificial life play the watchful and friendly role of the baker around the corner, or the neighbourhood garbage collector?
