Safety in Numbers

The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25cnd-jacobs.html) article reporting the death of Jane Jacobs had this to say about her West Village neighborhood and lifestyle there:

“She puts out her garbage, children go to school, the drycleaner and barber open their shops, housewives come out to chat, longshoremen visit the local bar, teenagers return from school and change to go out on dates, and another day is played out. Sometimes odd things happen: a bagpiper shows up on a February night, and delighted listeners gather around. Whether neighbors or strangers, people are safer because they are almost never alone.”

How could someone imagine of bulldozing a neighborhood such as this? City planners often see unpleasant or older looking building and believe that they can improve upon it. That never seems to work; as Jacobs has tried to convey, people are what make the city, not the buildings or landscape. These people living their everyday lives and interacting with one another are what makes the city, New York in this case, what it is.

This neighborhood is diverse-there are people of all different professions, age groups, and probably ethnicities, that allow this neighborhood to function in this manner. The housing projects that Jacobs speaks out against are the downfall of our cities, and the origin of crime. There is no diversity, the people there are contained, and they are supplied with areas, such as parks, where there is no watching eye, no pedestrians to potentially stop them from committing crime.

So, maybe cities are something that should develop naturally. For hundreds of years they formed on their own, near resources, businesses and other people. Why do we now need to plan out how they will be set up when they have come about naturally for all this time?

No More Poverty

This photograph, titled “A Bandit’s Roost,” by Jacob Riis is part of a vast collection of his photos documenting the lives of the impoverished in New York City in the late 19th century. Riis’s work as a police reporter, and later social reformer, helped to draw the right attention to these travesties, and change was quickly drawn about. There is no longer poverty of this nature, or at least not as widespread, in New York City today.

Many people however, still view cities as places of immense poverty and rampant crime. Many imagine a sight very similar to the photograph when they think of a city; a dark alleyway, sunlight blocked by renters’ laundry, filled with gangsters waiting to mug the next intruder. It is frustrating that so many people fear a sight like this when they enter a city, clutching their purses. That is a completely inaccurate perception of cities, and people need to start realizing that and recognize that the suburbs aren’t exactly crime free.

City of Sentiment

Sociologist Robert E. Park wrote of cities “The city is a state of mind, a body of customs and traditions, and of organized attitudes and sentiments that inhere in this tradition. The city is not, in other words, merely a physical mechanism and an artificial construction. It is involved in the vital processes of the people who compose it, it is a product of nature and particularly of human nature.” (http://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/centcats/fac/facch17_01.html)

Cities happen. Hundreds of years ago no one had planned that Manhattan Island would be one of the greater, richer, more important cities of the world. Hundreds of years ago no one planned out numerous skyscrapers for this particularly small plot of land. Cities evolve. A few businesses started on this island, probably because it was near water, so people came. The people then started new businesses. All these businesses brought wealth. The wealth attracted other people, even some immigrants. And then, a lot of immigrants. In the mean time, more buildings were constructed to support the businesses as well as the swelling population. A city is the ultimate product of human nature; it was created to meet human needs to make money and socialize. The city was, and still is, where everything happens. That’s why people flock to them.

Park is urging his readers to look at the sentimental value cities hold. He is saying that cities were not artificial constructions because they were developed out of human needs, both basic needs and those triggered by emotions. People originally flocked to the cities out of a strong desire to make money. The same can be said today, only now there are many people who are in cities who stay because of sentimental value, or simply because it meets their natural human instinct to be where everything is happening.

The term “cottage industry” is defined as “An industry where the creation of products and services is home-based, rather than factory-based” (http://www.investorwords.com/1163/cottage_industry.html). Cottage industries surprisingly still exist today, although our country seems to be made up of one giant corporation after another. If you Google the term, many links will turn up for actual cottage industries, which provide creative ideas for homemakers and handicrafts.

This small scale, local production has stiff competition today from corporations, however; in the past these cottage industries were merely bought up, relocated in cities, and eventually turned into the corporations. Well, first they became factories, or what sounds a lot like sweatshops of today. These factories provided the setting for Mumford’s “The Beginnings of Coketown.” They turned already industrial towns into “dark hives, busily puffing, clanking, screeching, smoking for twelve and fourteen hours a day, sometimes going around the clock.”

According to the article “In defense of the suburbs” by Leo Boland, (http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2004/oct/06/urbandesign.politics) this type of city no longer exists where it had originated. The former “Coketown” is now a center of finance education and culture. Boland also points out however that Mumford stated that a suburb was not and could not become a city. What happened in that age of cottage industries then? When their production and labor was bought up, relocated, and formed the first cities, it seems to prove that a suburb (or something of that nature) can in fact become a city.

"Blase Attitude"

What is a city symbolic of? Intellect? Power? Crime, poverty...money? A city can be symbolic of all these aspects, and each of these aspects has an affect on its inhabitants. Cities are widely known as centers of civilization; ironically they have only been around for the last 7,000 years of humanity's existence. Since cities are so recent to human development, why do those who live there appear much more civilized than most? And why do more and more people flock to cities?
In his essay, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," Georg Simmel takes a look at how all the aforementioned factors of city life affect the individual, and how they cope with it. The "blasé attitude" employed by most city dwellers is possibly what makes them seem more intellectual, more civilized than most. It is this coping mechanism that Simmel states helps them deal with "rapidly changing and closely compressed contrasting stimulations of the nerves." In other words, there is so much going on in a city at one time, that people eventually shut down and begin to ignore everything that is happening around them in order to stay sane in their environment.
So, what attracts people to this environment in the first place? It is where EVERYTHING is happening, all the time. People are drawn by the stimuli, the busy lifestyle, the nightlife, the culture and the diversity that can only be found in the city. Check out this piece by Kieran Healy http://crookedtimber.org/2009/01/11/the-metropolis-and-mental-life/ on the psychology of city life. Healy basically agrees with what Simmel says, but goes one step further in trying to prove that a prolonged exposure to an urban environment can impairs a person's basic mental processes. So are the stimuli that attract people actually dangerous? Or is the mechanism people use to cope with the stimuli dangerous? Quite possibly none of it is damaging, it is just a way of life so unique that many still find it hard to understand completely.