Eyes on the streets

What are sidewalks for? _ The first thing that comes to my mind is a place for walking or bicycling. Many people would say that sidewalks really don’t serve at all and some would add it for street vendors. Jane Jacobs, in The Life and Death of Great American Cities, says, “Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks – the pedestrian parts of the streets – serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians.”

I would like to state that I really enjoyed reading this article, it was very beautifully written and talked about a basic issue in our architecture, “Sidewalks” in regard to city planning and urban design. Maintaining or designing a safe environment has more than often been a tough task attaining, in condensed urbanized neighborhoods.

I recall many events in my own hometown, the difficulties some of the designed sidewalks created against the good of the neighborhood, increased crime and violence. Jacob's main statement about sidewalks is that they reflect about a city safe or unsafe. In her exact words, if someone says a city “is dangerous or is a jungle, what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.” The main intention of designing a sidewalk is to get people around on foot. There are some sidewalks in our neighborhood that are unused or some sidewalks full of people and some neighborhoods with no sidewalks. The neighborhood having active sidewalks is safe and the inactive sidewalks make it unsafe for the people of that place.

While they are walking the sidewalks, people have a habit of keeping an eye on things. Streets where people do not use their sidewalks, such as in neighborhoods where people do not socialize with their neighbors and thus where crime is invited. The criminals know the streets where no one keeps a watch on the neighborhood, and those are the ones they target. To make a sidewalk safer and active, it is necessary to design shorter-distance sidewalks, in the community that has spread out people and having community public spaces in-between spaces. Therefore, we see that a place having activities and the need to walk the streets to conduct business creates a place where people are safe. Sidewalks would no longer be considered as a long route to get out of fast, instead, they would become a purposeful means of interactive dialogs with nearing neighbors and strangers. The more “eyes on the streets” the less increasing chances there will be of crime taking place in an open public place.