In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs writes: “City sidewalks—the pedestrian parts of the streets—serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. These uses are bound up with circulation but are not identical with it, and in their own right they are at least as basic as circulation to the proper workings of cities” (29). In her book, Jacobs considers how and why people make use of public and private spaces in ways that differ from, circumvent, or appropriate their planned functions.
For this assignment, choose a public or pseudo-public area in a local city—a section of Moody Street or Harvard Square, for instance, or even a space on campus—to write about. Spend as much time as you can observing how the space is used—observe it for a minimum of an hour (but more and on repeated visits if possible). Pay attention to small details:
- the particular shops; their facades, signage, and window displays; what they sell, who enters them, and for how long;
- the demographic variety of pedestrians (gender, age, ethnicity, etc.) as well as any particular pedestrians that stand out;
- pedestrian behaviors and apparel;
- any graffiti, vandalism, recent paving, or other signs of deterioration or renovation;
- the emotional affect of the space;
- the safety rules of the space and how they are enforced;
- how privacy is maintained where it exists;
- the layout, including how vegetation, furniture, belongings, technology, hydrants, ramps, curbs, signs, and cars are incorporated into that layout;
- anything else that strikes your fancy.
Keep on the lookout for any details or patterns that strike you as interesting, anomalous, or strange, as those could provide the basis for your essay. Don’t write about all of these details, but be aware that a good idea might involve any of them or others that haven’t been listed here. Your essay should ultimately be mostly analytical and explanatory; minimize your description of the space only to the details that you focus on analyzing and arguing about.
Then craft an argument about the space, or something within the space, based on close analysis of it. You can draw from principles found in Jacobs’s book, but you do not need to and you should not do so extensively (don’t focus on explaining how Jacobs would see the space). The main goal of this exercise is to develop your own original analysis of the space; treat Jacobs primarily as an example of another author crafting a similar kind of argument. If you feel at a loss, you might begin by considering how your observations accord with and deviate from the space’s planned function. Or to put it another way, you might ask, what definitions of “success” are appropriate to this space, is the space “successful” or “unsuccessful,” and what else might be going on in this space?