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.

Hunker down, now (part 1)

Sorry in advance for all the academic-y name dropping.

Robert Putnam’s research and publications are now synonymous with the concepts of social capital and civic disengagement. We are now Bowling Alone, according to Putnam, and are disengaged from the same level of community participation forged by previous generations.

My friend Jessie and I are presenting case studies contradicting these claims at a conference at the end of June

Anyway, Putnam’s “hunkering thesis” is a product of his subsequent research:

New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. “E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture,” Scandinavian Political Studies.

I’ve red-marked my copy to high heaven. I have a couple problems with what Putnam infers from his data. But the issue I want to focus on today is his place-agnostic research method.

Putnam marshals a national sample size of nearly 30,000, with the ability to drill down within 41 subsamples of 350 to 1500 for areas ranging in size from neighborhood to county. You might think that would be plenty place-specific.

Putnam recognizes that the community-level data lacks “contextual effect,” yet the only context he then provides comes from the US Census (tract-level). The only factors he includes are socioeconomic, despite the housing data available for the same census geography.Does the giant, disembodied head of Ferdinand Tönnies make you hunker down?

Ideally, I’d want to know more about the place than census reveals. I am an urban planner (though I shy away from complete environmental determinism). The data about the physical form of the place is much, much harder to come by. Get out your tape measure.

And this is the roundabout way we end up back at what Jane Jacobs has to say about contact with each other and sidewalks:

When an area of a city lacks a sidewalk life, the people of the place must enlarge their private lives if they are to have anything approaching equivalent contact with their neighbors. They must settle for some form of ‘togetherness,’ in which more is shared with one another than in the life of sidewalks, or else they must settle for lack of contact. Inevitably the outcome is one or the other; it has to be; and either has distressing results. “The uses of sidewalks: contact,” The Death and Life of Great American Cities (p62-63)

How wide are the sidewalks where these folks “hunker down?” Do they go anywhere? Is there physical diversity? In other words: Are there sidewalks and do people use them?

When we were rural, other social ties, norms, and institutions governed our level of contact - Gemeinschaft. Gesellschaft (a la Tönnies or Wirth) relies on secondary contacts, or “weak ties.” More tomorrow.