Getting it wrong: planning moralisms and city sidewalks

In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies. The ideal of a matriarchy inevitably accompanies all planning in which residences are isolated from other parts of life. “The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p83)

Jacobs skips ahead to one of the city diversity conditions: primary mixed uses. Separation of uses promotes the sexist “separate spheres” for public and private life. Typified by nineteenth century Victorians, men operated in the public sphere of work and daily life outside the home; women operated in the private sphere of the home (at least according to the ideal).

This is probably not the last time I link to The Great Good Place.The “separate spheres” setup forgets the interstitial space. If home is the primary place, work is the secondary place, then other places to meet or connect are “third places” in the parlance of Ray Oldenburg.

On good city streets, populated with all others, male and female, “carrying on other their other pursuits.” (“The uses of sidewalks: assimilating children” The Death and Life of Great American Cities, p82), sidewalks—part of the public right-of-way or public realm—are another “third place,” valuable not only for contact and self-policing, but also supervision and rearing/”assimilation” of children.

Sidebar: Thanks to @gosner for a timely link: The Built Environment: Designing Communities to Promote Physical Activity in Children. The American Academy of Pediatrics ties a direct link between the built environment and children’s health. Unfortunately, they focus on the presence of parks. They do mention walking to school and social norms surrounding how parents allow children to play, but they shy away from Jacobs’ love of sidewalks. They do appear quite worried about asthma.

Orthodox planning is much imbued with puritanical and Utopian conceptions of how people should spend their free time, and in planning, these moralisms on people’s private lives are deeply confused with concepts about the workings of cities. “The uses of sidewalks: safety” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p41)

For years, urban areas formed as a result of the needs, means and behaviors of their inhabitants - urban form as evidence (see Habit - Unaverage Clues). Suddenly shocked by living conditions in overcrowded urban areas around the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century city planning took root in the real and pressing need to improve health standards. We got carried away, tricking ourselves into thinking that we knew better - than the city and those forming it:

For the purpose of promoting health, safety, morals, or the general welfare of the community, the legislative body of cities and incorporated villages is hereby empowered to regulate and restrict the height, number of stories and size of buildings and other structures, the percentage of lot that may be occupied, the size of yards, courts, and other open spaces, the density of population and the location and use of buildings, structures and land of trade, industry, residence or other purposes. Standard State Zoning Enabling Act (pdf) emphasis added.

Yes, your city can promote specific morals - even to the detriment of the workings of cities.