Sesame Street Remixed
Jane Jacob’s idea of the use of sidewalks as a safety mechanism in the urban context speaks to me as a woman. I do tend to feel safer no matter the time of day walking down a congested road as opposed to a desolate road. When she talks about a narrow crowded, multi-use street, I picture TV shows from my childhood visually represented as streets in a larger city with row houses on it. In the setting of the shows, the neighborhood kids are usually out playing some kind of team sports in the middle of the road while the parents are inside keeping a visual from the front window. Hardly ever does a car come down the road but if it does, the kids move out of the way for a quick second then resume activity.
This setting still exists today but no longer in urban areas. This is what suburbia now looks like. When we think of New York city, we dont picture Jane Jacob’s Greenwich Village but we picture the rows and rows of high rises. How can we as architects bring back the idea of safe “sidewalks” and multi-use “streets” in the context of skyscrapers? Building up instead of out is more sustainable so to start to combine safety and with verticality seems like the next step. Many buildings we see in Asia have incorporated terracing in high rises to add vegetation as a measure of increased quality of space. But does this terracing increase safety or the idea of “eyes on the street” that Jacobs talks about?
I think this is an interesting topic to ponder. I specifically can think of one place (that I would consider a skyscraper area) that does just this: Barcelona. Barcelona has taken back blocks of streets and cityscapes and rebranded them as "superblocks." Certain parts of the roads have been newly defined as pedestrian access only and the car-friendly roads have speeds reduced to 15 mph. I think this could be applicable in U.S. cities with careful planning and considerations for the user.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering if reviving street life in the way you are describing is less related to the buildings we erect in dense environments and is more related to quality infrastructure. The streets are not safe because pedestrians have forfeited over that space specifically for the use of the car. We've designed our cities, suburbs, and everything in between to rely exclusively on the individual's automobile instead of investing the money of highway infrastructure on things like high speed rails and quality public transit. We no doubt need to design vertically for density, but the cars that come with it are the evil in the streets.
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