Seton Wakenshaw: SIDEWALKS IN THE SKY

MA A+U student Seton Wakenshaw's thesis project

‘Sidewalks in the Sky’

Based in Manhattan the ‘Sidewalks in the Sky’ project considers a series of smaller ‘perfect states’ as a more realistic proposition to improving the underused cities that we inhabit. A series of strategically placed ‘lungs’ within our urban realm are created, that offer up smaller scale, temporary utopias that will enrich our individual and collective wellbeing.

The design recalls Jane Jacobs’ observations of New York that “Streets and their sidewalks, the main public spaces of a city are its most vital organs” with the introduction of functional rooftop ‘sidewalks’ establishing a new sense of community through pedestrian occupied spaces in the sky.

The images below document Seton's design process and the development of his project.

Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

Reviewed by Damien Woolliscroft

‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ is the first of several books by writer and activist Jane Jacobs. Upon publication in 1961, the book received mixed reviews, many of which disregarded Jacobs’ ideas because of her lack of a professional architectural or planning qualification. Jacobs’s research was undertaken by analysing the districts and neighbourhoods first hand. Her home district Greenwich Village, New York is frequently referred throughout the book as it aided her ideas. Divided into four main parts, the book criticises the ideas of what cities should be like by ideologues, such as Le Corbusier and Ebenezer Howard to what they are in reality, complex organic systems.
Part One ‘The Peculiar Natures of Cities’ introduces the micro scale of Jacob’s ideas, ‘Sidewalk Safety and Contact’. The purpose of the sidewalk is not only to carry pedestrians to and from places, it is a public space in itself and for a district to be successful, pedestrians need to feel safe and secure on sidewalks with strangers. For this to happen sidewalks must have three main qualities; ‘Clear mark of private and public space; must be eyes on the street at all times and sidewalks must have users on it fairly continuously.’

Jacobs expresses the importance of local public characters in neighbourhoods, explaining that they strengthen the ‘eyes’ on the sidewalk and help form a social network, dispersing community news and connecting the local population. However, if there is a rapid change in population, the ‘eyes’ on the sidewalk are new, thus safety is jeopardised, particularly where children’s security is concerned.
Numerous issues with garden city planning are raised throughout the book. One in particular, which is the creation of child-rearing spaces at the centre of superblocks, where young children can be easily supervised. However, the design of such structures neglects the outer sidewalks as the ‘eyes’ are predominantly fixated on the interior spaces leading to a false sense of security. Jacobs describes parks as ‘volatile spaces’ and like sidewalks need ‘eyes’ and continuous usage but vast open spaces make this much more difficult to resolve. If a neighbourhood park fails to attract people, it must become a specialised park, incorporating special attractions to draw people into the space.

In Part Two ‘The Generators of City Diversity’, Jacobs discusses four conditions, which must be met in order to generate exuberant diversity. The need for primary uses, short blocks, aged buildings and sufficient concentration of people. Jacobs’s states that Primary uses i.e. work, education, museums, public buildings etc are buildings considered as anchors to a district; they attract people to a district and create secondary diversity, enterprises which thrive in response to the presence of primary uses. Each district should have at least one primary use to ensure enough activity within the district at different times.
Jacobs explains the need for aged buildings, as they ensure low rent yields, encouraging the growth of small enterprises. Furthermore, for a district to be diverse, it must incorporate a mixture of low, medium and high yield buildings. Large swatches of new construction are ineffective as only highly profitable organisations are able to afford the high overheads.

Small blocks, allow for a greater cross-use within a Neighbourhood or District as residents are able to explore streets which they would not have explored beforehand. This leads to more feasible spots for commerce due to the increased routes available for citizens.
The need for a relatively dense environment of between 100 to 200 dwellings per acre increases the number of users on the sidewalks and eyes on street. However, too dense a concentration leads to high rise housing, where sight lines are inadequate to keep the sidewalks safe and structures become standardised. On the other hand, low-density areas lead to stagnant ‘grey areas which are in danger of becoming slums.

Part Three. ‘Forces of Decline and Regeneration’ discusses the ideas on the tendency for great diversity to be self destructive where certain neighbourhoods or districts become so popular with one particular use that there is no diversity left due to the profitability of that use. Jacobs explains that problems are far more serious if this use is duplicated across districts.
Amongst other destructive natures of cities, Jacobs writes about border vacuums and the physical and functional effects they have on cities by creating boundaries, dead ends and splitting the city into small fragments. Using the West side of Central Park, New York, she states that the easiest of borders to correct are those that could encourage much greater use of their perimeters.
The ‘Urban Renewal’ slum clearance program in the late 1940’s and 1950’s was catastrophic; the programme devoured numerous neighbourhoods in an attempt to thwart slums. However, a slum cannot be replaced with high yield projects as this does not overcome problems which created the slum in the first place. Instead the slum is redistributed amongst other districts. Jacobs proposes that the key in un-slumming a slum is in stopping people leaving the slum too fast. If a sense of community is strong enough, residents will more likely stay and overtime develop their homes and neighbourhood.

In the chapter ‘Cataclysmic Money’, the author emphasises that money can only do harm when it destroys the four conditions for diversity. Jacobs explains that one of the most damaging ideas is Credit Blacklisting by lending institutions, which has severe implications on slums and their ability to un-slum as residents are unable to gain credit to start local enterprises or complete works on their homes.
The last part, ‘Different tactics’ attacks legislations within the planning department, especially low income housing schemes. The idea of separating people by income seems un-natural, generates a variety of problems, and creates issues with local enterprises as their clients may not be able to afford their products. Instead of low-income housing, Jacobs stipulates that the government should subsidise rent on private dwellings for low-income earners, thus dispersing the low-income population around the city.
Jacobs expresses her hatred for traffic arteries, parking lots, gas stations, automobiles and the toll they have on the city, particularly on the erosion of sidewalks. She acknowledges the need for cars but believes that there should be far less and those remaining should be made to work harder.

Finally, Jacobs concludes the book on the stance that cities are formed from organised complexities. These complexities are not simple but are intertwined with each other. Vertical structures oversimplify these complexities thus horizontal structures work better in city planning.
‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ is in no doubt, one of the most inspiring urban planning texts of the 20th century. The style of writing employed by Jacobs makes the book a pleasure to read and her love for cities shines through each page. The impact of Jane Jacobs and ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities’ has been profound in the architectural and urban planning world as well as New York. In 2009 a block on Hudson Street, Greenwich Village was renamed ‘Jane Jacobs Way’ in honour of the writer who offered a different way of thinking about cities.

Jane Jacobs: The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)

A precis by Chen Xu

Jane Jacobs was an American-born Canadian writer and activist with a primary interest in communities and urban planning and decay. She is best known for The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961), a powerful critique of the urban renewal policies of the 1950s in the United States. The book has been credited with reaching beyond planning issues to influence the spirit of the times.

When I first read this book, to my surprise I found that the writer Jane Jacobs had a non-professional background in urban planning and architecture. She studied at Columbia University's extension school for two years, taking courses in geology, zoology, law, political science, and economics. However, this Book is considered a greatly influential book on the subject of urban planning in the 20th century.

In my opinion Jacobs observes cities and she is a very careful observer. She watches the cities from a normal person’s perspective. She analyses what she sees. She has the enthusiasm and sense of responsibility. She believes that people should be responsible for watching their own surroundings, thereby bringing safety and helping to make the area vibrant.

For example, Jacobs talks about sidewalks, neighborhood parks and city neighbors, and how these elements form a the peculiar nature of cities. How important are these elements? We are familiar with the things which Jane Jacobs talks about because they are around us. We can see them in our daily life, such as sidewalks, parks, neighbors and so on.

Opposing expressways and supporting neighborhoods were common themes in her life. In 1962, she was the chairperson of the "Joint Committee to Stop the Lower Manhattan Expressway", when the downtown expressway plan was stopped. She was arrested during a demonstration on April 10, 1968. In the same year, Jacobs moved to Toronto, where she lived until her death. She quickly became a leading figure in her new city and helped stop the proposed Spadina Expressway. A frequent theme of her work was to ask whether we are building cities for people or for cars.

Personally, I believe Jane Jacobs has become someone more than a writer as well as a fighter. She was already been a public leader and people trusted her more than governments. The book's purpose was to criticize the values of American urban planning from the 1950s and 1960s, when in many cities in North America the problem facing the decline of downtown areas, the former prosperity of downtown slums, and massive postwar urban renewal was under way. This was the era of the rise of modernist planning, of Le Corbusier's dream in the progressive realization of the city.

Jane Jacobs's critique is that this kind of urban planning and lifestyle, will make the city lose its vitality, resulting in a loss of pleasure. She believed the city is an organism, detailed and diversified, so that economic and social activities mixed with each other produce vibrant city, so it should be seen in the context of life science urban rehabilitation, rather than cold figures, scientific planning razed to the name of a large-scale urban redevelopment. A great city values the diversity, and this diversity is the need to maintain a certain environment, such as street life, the importance of neighborhood life is to control the car and refuse repetition of the urban landscape.

The street itself does not actually exist, it only refers to the use of building edges. But the "street" is when you think of a first impression of the city. Cities and suburbs' or towns' biggest difference lies not in size, but in the city "full of strangers." The most basic elements of the city is safety in the streets you can trust to make contact with strangers.

Jane Jacobs thinks the first thing to understand is that the public peace - the sidewalk and street of the cities - is not primarily kept by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious network of voluntary controls and standards among people themselves.

Some people think that the middle-class or upper-class family build good neighborhoods and poor families fail to. That is wrong. For example,within the poverty of the North End of Boston, or within the poverty of the West Greenwich Village waterfront neighborhoods, good neighborhoods were created. In the meantimes, within the upper-class Boston ‘s South End, bad neighborhoods were created, neighborhoods which internal failure grew greater with time instead of less.

Throughout the 1950s, the cost of building rose. There is a simple fact that no matter how steady the construction costs are. a old building requires less income that one which has not yet paid off its capital costs. Among the most admirable and enjoyable sights to be found along the sidewalks of big cities are the ingenious adaptations of old quarters to news uses. The town-house parlor that becomes a craftsman’s showroom, the stable that becomes a house, the basement becomes an immigrants’ club. the garage that becomes a theatre, the warehouse becomes a factory. These are the signs of life and are forever ocourring where a city has vitality.

Fifth Avenue in New York is an example has been mentioned many times in Jacobs’ book. She thinks this is good area for preserving the aged buildings that makes this area vibrant. It shows how good a city can be. Between 40th Street and 59th Street it is tremendously diverse in its large and small shops, bank buildings, office buildings, churches and institutions. Its architecture express these differences in use, and differences accrue from the varying ages of the buildings, difference in technology and the history of taste. But 5th Avenue does not look disorganized.They are sensible and natural contrasts and differences. The whole hangs together remarkably well.

In contrast railway tracks, waterfronts, campuses, expressways, large parking areas, and large parks have much in common with each other, insofar their tendency to create vacuums. As many city elements as possible must be used to build a lively, mixed territory, and as few as possible must be used to create unnecessary boundaries.

Automobiles are hardly destroyers of cities. The fact is that there are too many cars on the roads! Today, cars and cities should have been allies, however, they seem to be enemies.

When life science developed quickly, people hoped that they would find a new method to analyse the city. As to whether there is some connection between science and urban planning, Jane Jacobs does not confirm her attitude. Personally, I believe Cities are different from nature. cities include economy, society, social activities. Urban planning can simply copy from life science.

Dull, inert cities, it is true, do contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to overcome problems and needs outside themselves.