The Streets Drive the City

 

After reading the excerpt from ‘The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety’ from The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, I see both the street and the sidewalk in a different light than before.

When you begin to think about a city, the majority of people will first think of hustle and bustle and the liveliness of the city. That liveliness is typically referred to or represented by the streets. For example, when most people think of New York the first thing that might come to mind is Times Square. Times Square is a part of New York that sees around 330,000 people pass through it daily. And the extension of the street is the sidewalk. Whenever you think of a sidewalk, you mostly never think of them further than being a circulation tool for pedestrians and keeping them safe from the vehicles on the streets. Sidewalks in the suburbs, a small town, and the city have the same general function but operate a lot differently than the other. The main obvious difference is that cities are larger than towns and denser than suburbs. In towns and suburbs, it would be a safer bet to say that you would/could know the person walking past you versus in the city. In a city more often than not the person you walk by is a stranger.

                And even with that, the added layer of the streets being a city's “most vital organs” as Jacobs put it, makes it one of the biggest draws for people to come to a city. When looking for a new and interesting place to visit, if the streets don’t look lively people aren’t going to be inclined to come. No one wants to visit a boring city and if the streets and sidewalks don’t look busy or interesting there goes your opportunity to hook visitors. It is pretty interesting how something that many people just see as a circulation method drives how keen we would be to go to a city. So places like New York, Los Angeles, Vegas, and Miami see a lot of visitors because their city streets look very interesting meaning that the city seems interesting making it very inviting.  And the 3 main qualities a city street must always do to be successful according to Jacobs are as follows: 1) Have a clear demarcation between public & private space 2) Have eyes upon the street of those called the natural proprietors of the street and 3) The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously. I think these are some good qualities for city streets to have. Therefore we see how big of a difference a lively city street makes versus a city with a quiet/calm city street.