The Death and Life of Great American Cities
From CollabLandWiki
Part One- The Peculiar Nature of Cities
The Uses Of Sidewalks: Safety
Keeping a city safe is a fundamental task of a city's streets and sidewalks. Everyone must use the streets. Cities differ from towns or the suburbs in the basic way that cities are full of strangers. There are three misconceptions of ways to make the sidewalks and streets safer.
1. Public peace is primarily enforced by police but in fact its the people who live there and voluntarily enforce the controls and standards.
2. You can create a safer environment by sprawl but in places like LA, which are suburbs, it's no safer.
3. That crime happens anywhere, which it can but it's more likely to happen where there is a given opportunity. A well used city street is apt to be a safer street than a deserted one.
To have a city equipped to handle strangers, and make an asset, you must: 1. Have a clear demarcation between public and private space, 2. Have watching eyes on the street and, 3. Continuous activity to give the eyes something to watch and entertain themselves. A good example of this is a small town. Everybody knows everybody and they operate through reputation, gossip, approval and disapproval.
A requisite for surveillance is quantity of stores, bars, and restaurants because: 1. It gives people a reason to use the sidewalks, 2. It draws people to walk routes to somewhere else, maximizing criss crossing paths, 3. Owners and employees become proponents of peace in order because it's good for business and, 4. The site of other people attract other people, not the other way around.
Rich neighborhoods have little do it yourself surveillance. They come and go so much they are hardly interested in the daily ongoings of other. They handle this situation in a different manner, by hiring doormen. Good lighting is important but not he only factor. Fencing in areas is not a viable answer. It makes the occupants feel like prisoners.
Corridors of low income high rises, elevators and stairwells can be considered streets. They are traveled a lot but they have no watchful eyes on them. This makes them very unsafe.
If the continuation of current practices, there are three modes of living with these conditions: 1. Let the unfortunate take the consequences, 2. Take refuge in vehicles, kinda like a wild life refuge and, 3. The cultivation of the institution of "turf"
The Uses of Sidewalks: Contact
There is a profound misjudgment that people hanging out on the streets as bad. The point of the social life of city sidewalks is they are public and bring people together who don't know each other in an intimate private way.
What makes a person take action: trust. This comes from many little public sidewalk contacts like a conversation at a store or bar. These contacts result in a feeling of public identity with respect and trust. The absence of this implies no private commitment.
In small towns everyone knows your business. In the city nobody does, only those you choose to tell will know much about you. This is one of the attributes of cities that is precious to most city people.
Architecture deals with privacy in terms of windows, overlooks, and site lines. The privacy of keeping ones personal affairs to selected individual and having reasonable control over who shall take up your time, are the rare commodities that deal with privacy.
When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, people must enlarge their private lives if they want contact with neighbors. The two outcomes are more is shared individually or more often they settle for lack of contact and become choosy who their neighbors are or whom they associate with.
The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self appointed characters. The main qualification is one who is public, that talks to lots of different people, for example shop owners, pastors, and specialized sidewalk characters. Unpurposeful and random as they appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city wealth of public life may grow.
The Uses of Sidewalks: Assimilating Children
People think that if children can get off the streets and into parks and playgrounds on which to exercise, that everything would be better. The hard truth is that is false. Most gang fights and rapes happen at these unsupervised, unseen by the public eyes, areas of the city.
Planners began making enclosed courtyards to help keep kids off the street in a protected environment. This works well with little ones but as children get older they find these places boring. When they get older they become more energetic and noisy which is not welcomed in these courtyard communities.
Parks should be devoted to more than open space and playground equipment. They should consider areas such as ice skating rinks, swimming pools, boat ponds, and other specific outdoor uses. Poor generalized play areas eat up substance that could instead be used for good generalized play.
Planners don't realize what a high ratio of adults is needed to care for children and incidental play nor do they seem to understand that spaces and equipment do not care for children. Children learn from everyday ordinary adults. They learn to imitate adult attitudes.
Why do you think children frequently roam the streets? Because they find them more interesting.
Neighborhood Parks
Parks are volatile and can run in extremes.
Parks influence each other -It takes three acres of woods to absorb as much carbon dioxide that four people breathing, cooking, and heating. -some assume that parks are real estate stabilizers but its not true. -too much is expected from city parks
The way the city is arranged affects the park, the higher the diversity the better. People who can come at all times during the day, like those on lunch break and others who come after school are all needed for a functioning park. When the park is run down and empty it will remain that way. If the park is well used others will be attracted to it.
Dont bring parks to the people, the most successful are never seen as barriers of interceptors to the function of the city. The architecture doesn't matter so much as the socio and cultural, again diversity is best. The income of the users have nothing to do with how well a park will function.
Parks used as a public yard have four basic elements -Intricacy- a variety for people to come there, intricacy at eye level -Centering- a crossroad or climax. All small scale parks seem to have a central focal point. -Sun -Enclosure
Uses of City Neighborhoods
City neighborhoods are broken up into smaller parts and it's success is dependent on these and how they work together. It doesn't matter how well a neighborhood looks it's how it functions as a whole. This was proven with a small experiment that showed delinquency was higher in improved housing than in the slums.
The setting is also very important. People in the city move around more, they travel to work and play areas and have a lack of self containment, which is essential to a city economically and socially. Though cities are very dependent on the neighborhoods.
There are three kinds of neighborhoods 1. The city as a whole 2. The street neighborhoods 3. Districts of a large sub-city
Street Neighborhoods
These are neighborhoods that are made on the streets. They must draw upon help when trouble comes which is too big for the street to handle. There is also no distinct beginning or end to a street neighborhood, in fact it can be different for two people in the same spot. These neighborhoods aren't straight by any reason and often turn and curve around a long neighborhood is a charactoristic of failure.
Districts
These are used to mediate between the streets and the city as a whole. They must be big enough to fight city hall. Example narcotics in West Side Manhattan 1955. Effective districts are able to get information to the top and can change city policy.
If a district is alone it will be helpless against other neighborhoods and the government itself.
Only neighborhoods that have useful functions in self government will 1. Foster lively and interesting streets 2. Create a fabric, a continuous network as possible throughout the district of potential size and power. 3. Use parks, squares and public buildings as street fabric 4. Emphasize functional identity and areas large enough to be districts.
The size of a district should be big enough to fight city hall bit not so big as to draw attention away from the street neighborhoods. They also need good communication and morale. Effective street neighborhoods and districts posses the power of votes. There doesnt seem to be any district over 200,000 people and the most effective are about a mile and a half a block. The physical size, though, is determined by objects that form barriers.
Each district is different and not self contained. They depend on the relationships formed between the inhabitants. Though not every one is needed for the district to function, a few people who know unlikely people are always good to have. Networks will form and once a few have come about many more will weave together creating a giant network.
For a network to form it needs three things. 1. A start of some kind 2. A place big enough to meet in. 3. Time
If the relationships within the network are disrupted it can wreak havoc causing helplessness and instability, sometimes the system will never recover. This can happen when the government tries for a urban renewal, sending people out of their homes and making them move away. Other times it can be caused by those who see the well functioning neighborhood and want to join themselves, setting off the balance. A good city neighborhood can handle newcomers at a gradual pace.
Districts and neighborhoods work when there is little change in the ways of the people that live there. Many places are very steady and stay the same, for people who move around in the world either with money or just their job, this can cause them to want to leave. If the neighborhood is more diverse it can accept the change brought on by the people living there and it will entice those to stay no matter what their economic status is.
The places that stay the same are often just seen as way stations and will never become a fully functioning and effective city neighborhood.
