“The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety”

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Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) loved the spontaneous human interactions that occur in city neighborhoods and deplored the mid-twentieth-century urban renewal projects and urban neighborhoods that were destroying the fabric of communities. In this selection from Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a bestseller when it was written that remains the most-read book on cities of all time with more than 254 editions published in fifteen languages, she analogizes the daily routine on the streets of older mixed-use neighborhoods to a ballet. Residents are treated to a daily drama in which they are the performers – a diurnal pattern of observable and comprehensible human activity that is possible only in places like New York City’s Hudson Street in New York City. Jacobs was also concerned with the devastating impact crime could have on urban neighborhoods. She argues that street and sidewalk design that encourages “eyes on the street” will help keep criminals away. Designs that draw children out to play, street vendors to ply their trades, and neighbors to socialize reduce crime. Big modernist buildings, wide streets, and cold facades not only destroy the soul of a neighborhood but increase crime. Preserving mixed-use, human-scale neighborhoods and learning from them in designing new ones provided the rationale for Jacobs’s own successful activism in opposition to destructive urban renewal and highway projects. Modernists and the urban renewal establishment fundamentally disagree with Jacobs and her frontal assault on planning of all kinds was too much for even the other great twentieth-century human-centered planner, Lewis Mumford, who called her ideas “home remedies for urban cancer.”