The Uses of Sidewalk and The Town-Country Magnet

Summary: “The Uses of Sidewalk” by Jane Jacobs and “The Town-Country Magnet” by Ebenezer Howard
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Summary: “The Uses of Sidewalk” by Jane Jacobs and “The Town-Country Magnet” by Ebenezer Howard
“The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety” by Jane Jacobs
Jane Jacobs’ book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” is frontal attack on the planning and architectural design of a modern city, especially on the colossal urban reconstruction projects under the patronage of Robert Moses, an influential redevelopment bureaucrat in New York. She scorned these kind of projects as a gateway to creating instant slums and questioned the widely held notion that while crowding is bad, parks are good. Instead, Jacobs inverts the conception to claim that the neighborhood sidewalks that were often crowded were the safest places especially for playing children while parks were dangerous. In “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety,” she shares her notions about the constitution of a neighborhood community and the determinants of a livable city. Jacobs looks into how cities function instead of how they should work as conceived by urban planners and designers by describing the key issues affecting modern cities. As an associate editor of Architectural Forum and neighborhood activist, Jacobs justifies her criticism by offering strategies that will enhance the performance of modern cities from the standpoint of an untrained planning professional. In “The Uses of Sidewalk,” Jacobs outlines three main uses of sidewalk: safety, contact, and assimilation of children.
The first function of sidewalk is public safety. Jacobs argues that street safety is supported by sidewalks that clearly separate the public and private use of streets, and by unconscious security offered by the eyes of both the pedestrians and those that watch the continual flow of people from buildings. To encourage this unconscious security, Jacobs recommends that there is a need for spontaneous assumption of general support for streets when needed or at least an element of trust among street users. Jacobs compares empty streets to deserted corridors, stairwells, and elevators in massive public housing projects. She calls such streets as “blind-eyed” spaces that are fashioned for the upper class but seriously lack amenities necessary for security. They are ill equipped in handling strangers who will automatically turn to be a menace. While empty streets are open to the public, they are shielded from public eye and therefore such areas lack the inhibitions and checks that are provided by the eye-policed city streets. Because there is a chronic lack of surveillance in parks, Jacobs argues that such an environment will not be achieved in city parks, which critics refer to be “safe.”
In criticizing most parks as “safe” havens, Jacobs points that the most successful and functional parks are only those ones under intense utilization by a range of companies and dwellers. Such successful parks are characterized by centering, intricacy, enclosure, and sun. Many people use parks because of intricacy among other reasons...