The Ballet of the Streets: Teaching about Cities at Street Level

Abstract

The urban scholar Jane Jacobs once described city life as “the ballet of the streets.” In more than a quarter-century of joint teaching, we have used Jacobs’ metaphor to help our students understand that cities are living organisms created and maintained, for good or ill, by the people who live and work in them. At the heart, our teaching are intense encounters with cities, a “street-level” experience designed not only to give students a chance to walk the city’s streets (especially streets lying far off the beaten path), but to meet its people, prominent and not, so that they can discover for themselves, in living context, the city’s culture, varying life-styles, and issues. Once they learn that cities are people, our longer-term hope is that they will become active in the cities and urban regions which almost assuredly lie in their futures. Given their international importance and astronomical growth over the last half-century, it is arguable that cities are the most significant social systems in the world and, as a result, are crucial for students to understand as cities. The purpose of this paper is to share, first, the methodology we have developed for studying cities “at street level”; and second, to suggest how that methodology might be used in the study of cities anywhere. Starting with a course comparing New York and Toronto, we have used a similar approach to study cities in England, Ireland, Italy, Central Europe, China, and Vietnam.