Seminar 1 - Jane Jacobs

The Use of sidewalks:
- if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe
from barbarism and fear. When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or is
a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.  To
keep the city safe is a fundamental task of a city’s streets and its sidewalks.
- cities are, by definition, full of strangers.
- the bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally
safe and secure on the street among all these strangers  A city district that fails in
this respect also does badly in other ways
- people do not use streets which they considered as dangerous, and this situation
become the streets more dangerous.
- Not is it illuminating to tag minority groups, or the poor, or the outcast with
responsibility for city danger. There are immense variations in the degree of civilization
and safety found among such groups and among the city areas where they live.
- The first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street peace -
of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily
by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary controls and standards
among the people themselves and enforced by the people themselves.
- The second thing to understand is that the problem of insecurity cannot be solved by
spreading people out more thinly, trading the characteristics of cities for the
characteristics of suburbs. If this could solve danger on the city streets, then Los
Angeles should be a safe city because superficially Los Angeles is almost all suburban.
- City street  How much easy opportunity does it offer to crime?

o Some city streets afford no opportunity to street barbarism. North End of
Boston. Similar cities with different levels of crime.
- A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted city street is apt to be
unsafe. But how does this work, really? And what makes a city street well used or
shunned? Why is the sidewalk mall in Washington Houses, which is supposed to be an
attraction, shunned? Why are the sidewalks of the old city just to its west not
shunned? What about streets that are busy part of the time and then empty abruptly?
- A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset must have three
main qualities.
o First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and
what is private space.
o Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might
call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to
handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must
be oriented to the street.
o The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the
number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings
along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.
- But it is not so simple to achieve these objects, especially the latter. You can’t make
people use streets they have no reason to use. You can’t make people watch streets
they do not want to watch.
- It is necessary to have stores, companies, etc:
o They give people concrete reasons to use the street
o They draw people along the sidewalks
o storekeepers and other small businessmen are typically strong proponents of
peace and order themselves
o Fourth, the activity generated by people on errands, or people aiming for food
or drink, is itself an attraction to still other people.
- more fundamental than the action and necessary to the action, is the watching itself
(cuenta la historia de su casa ).
- Suppose we continue with building, and with deliberate rebuilding, of unsafe cities.
How do we live with this insecurity?
o The first mode is to let danger hold sway, and let those unfortunate enough to
be stuck with it take the consequences. This is the policy now followed with
respect to low-income housing projects, and to many middle-income housing
projects.
o The second mode is to take refuge in vehicles. This is a technique practiced in
the big wild-animal reservations of Africa, where tourists are warned to leave
their cars under no circumstances until they reach a lodge.
o The third mode was developed by hoodlum gangs and has been adopted
widely by developers of the rebuilt city  institution of Turf: under the Turf
system in its historical form, a gang appropriates as its territory certain streets
or housing projects or parks - often a combination of the three.

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The Use of sidewalks:

- City street  How much easy opportunity does it offer to crime?

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