Sidewalks are After-Thoughts.

This is what the sidewalks looked like where I grew up. ^

I am not sure if this is true for anybody else, past life experiences or not, but sidewalks have always been underrated and unkept where I have lived. I grew up in the southern suburbia area of Charlotte where interstates turned to country roads. One of those awkward spans of development where sure, you had all of the stores you needed to get by, but they were not walking distance. Therefore, sidewalks and the idea of commuting by walking was irrelevant. Even the neighborhoods I grew up in: the houses were deep in the woods from one another. My helicopter mother always picked me up from my neighbor's houses by car because she feared me getting lost in the woods.

Outside of my country road suburbia childhood, I have lived in cities: Barcelona, Charlotte proper, Greenville, and Charleston. This is where I began to see the shift into what Jane Jacobs speaks of in her article "The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety." The city sidewalk by itself is meaningless like the decrepit, dissolving sidewalks in my country hometown. The spaces and conjunction of buildings is what gives it purpose.

I would unfortunately say that when city developers design, they could care less about sidewalks. Even myself. When I have designed in the last 6 years of school, I never even considered sidewalks and safety until I figured out my building design. It was never a shared language, it was an afterthought. We need to change our way of designing and consider the pre-existing conditions of the walkable space we have, and how are designs can respond to it, not vice-versa.