Here is an essay I wrote a while back for my freshmen writing seminar class up at Providence. It was the summary of a 17 page article about "The Use Of Sidewalks." Great. Sidewalks. Enthralling. Surprisingly, I got a passing grade on this. I will be sure to scan the original with all the teacher's comments and upload that soon. I would have posted this a while ago, but I didn't have a blog until now.
Tim Pleines
The Use of Sidewalks
In Jane Jacobs' essay entitled The Use of Sidewalks she discusses the factors that go into making a sidewalk/street “equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, out of the presence of strangers...”(Page 241). Apparently, Jacobs was unable to think of a more interesting topic to write about. Jacobs, a college dropout, manages to construct an essay that rivals the 9/11 Commission Report in terms of sheer boringness, which is a feat that even I would be proud of if I was a college dropout turned renowned urban theorist.
Jacobs argues that an ideal sidewalk or city street is to perform a couple of basic functions: to act as a mode of transportation for pedestrians, to properly handle strangers, and to perform as a self policing safety asset. For these functions to be performed properly, the sidewalk must operate in a “delicate sidewalk ballet”(Page 252). This ballet has three parts. First, “There must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space”. Second, there must always be eyes on the street. Buildings must be oriented towards the street so that residents' eyes are directed there. Third, the sidewalk must have a sufficient amount of traffic to “both add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in the buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers”(Page 241). To create this traffic, there needs to be a proper “sprinkling” of local businesses such as bars, night clubs, strip clubs, monasteries, chop shops, meth labs, Starbucks and a sweat shop full of illegal Chinese immigrants working around the clock to make those little umbrellas that you put in your iced tea. Such a “sprinkling” will keep the sidewalk relatively busy at all hours of the day and ensure that users of the sidewalk are safe. Jacobs goes on to talk about the negative effect that urban renewal has on a self-policing community. Urban renewal is to pedestrians' safety as to what this poorly thought out analogy is to my grade on this assignment. As buildings are modernized and rebuilt, they attract a different kind of resident, a resident that is not part of the close knit community and has no intention of becoming one. These types of people live the dog-eat- dog work-a-day on-the-go bluetooth headset microwavable hot pocket lifestyle and take the security of the neighborhood for granted. Eventually these people become the neighborhood, and thats when they really get screwed over. Violence reemerges and eventually gets so bad that a father, struggling to support his family, cannot even take a stroll down to the neighborhood drug dealer to buy a gram of cocaine for his starving wife and kids without risking getting shot, stabbed, iced, popped, capped or otherwise smoked. The residents eventually move away to a safe neighborhood and start the cycle again, still ignorant as to why things got so bad in the first place. Jacobs later goes on to criticize the way that some cities have handled the gang violence and turf warfare that have resulted from the urban renewal and the accompanying overall decline in safety . These cities have ignored the source of the problem- a “sidewalk ballet” so bad that you would have thought that Michael Bay had directed it- and have addressed the problem with only topical solutions. They have put up fences and created treaties between gangs dividing the territories up amongst them.
I think that it is important to keep in mind that although Jacobs' so-called urban theories seem to hold water today, in a year or two when things start to look more like Star Wars Episode 3 and we have cities built way up in the sky, flying cars, guns that shoot laser beams, fancy new side walks and a woman in a charge of the galactic senate, we will have to re-work Jacobs' theories which means that I will have to read yet another essay by Jacobs that will probably be called something like The Use Of Futuristic Looking Particle Beam Sidewalks and frankly, that is not a future that I am looking forward to.
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