People In The Sidewalks

A Piece of Concrete Determines Your Privacy

Could, a piece of concrete, that is a sidewalk be a determining factor in how safe you live in a city? How your social life goes on or even your control over your private life? The importance of sidewalks in cultivating public life and balancing privacy in cities is discussed by Jane Jacobs (1961) in her book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” who opposed the reformers in her city, who wanted to remove sidewalks, who passed the argument which it summary is “If these people [the people in sidewalks] had decent homes and a more private or bosky outdoor place, they wouldn’t be on the street!”(p.72). The reformers thought that the people who loitered in the sidewalks stay there because they

In the sidewalk, there are many shops and markets which attract the citizens, and in these shops many small interactions happen between the city citizens like some that Jacobs (1961) mentioned, “giving advice to the newsstand man, comparing opinions with other customers at the bakery and nodding hello to the two boys drinking pop on the stoop”, the previous interactions may seem trivial and even not worth mentioning if noted separately, but these casual public interactions aggregate together over time to form a profoundly important concept: trust. The product of people’s interactions in the sidewalk results in a shared feel of responsibility between the citizens, which create a web of trust between people. An evident instance that can exemplify the yield of sidewalk interactions is comparing the two sides of the same street in East Harlem, composed of same residents with same income and races, Jacobs (1961). On one side, the sidewalk was bustling, where the street was full of public life, and the children were being kept well in hand. On the project side, the other side, the children, were behaving destructively, drenching the open windows of the houses with water, and squirting on adults who passed by the project side of the street, and nobody dared to stop them (Jacobs 1961). The interactions between the citizens in the sidewalk on the first side of the street made a sense of shared responsibility and web of trust to arise between the citizens there, which made people safer in that side of the street, and thought on the other side of East Harlem street the difference is too drastic it was actually two side of one street. Another prominent example stated by Jacobs (1961) is Mr.Jaffe, who is a man who works in a candy store, and offers many kinds of help to the city citizen that is beyond his formal work scope; “One ordinary morning last winter Mr.Jaffe […] supervised the small children crossing at the