The Street: Rethinking the meaning and power of public space

Question 1

How do you imagine the street?

Answer 1

1. It could be a transportation corridor.
2. A political protest
3. Celebration
4. Frivolity
5. Riot
6. Parade/ Processions
7. Inequity and despair
8. Advertisement
9. Art and architecture
10. Control
11. Commerce
12. Leisure/ Play
13. Romance/ Public Display of Affection
14. Strike/ loss of order
15. Excrete or Experiment
16. Tragedy
17. Collective Remembrance/ Mourning

Question 2

Streets then…

Answer 2

“frame encounters that are both intimate and intrusive” (Zukin 1995)

are shared but contested spaces

“Symbolize public life, with all its human contact, conflict and tolerance” (Brophy quoted in Valentine 2001)

Asks us to (re)think about what/who defines the public in public space

Question 3

Prior to the 1850s: Paris was_______.

Answer 3

An overgrown medieval metropolis. It was dark, foul smelling, unsanitary and disease ridden. It was also impossible to get around in.

Question 4

Georges-Eugène Haussmann (Baron Haussmann)?`

Answer 4

1. Master planner
2. Viewed Paris as a sick organism
3. Changed the meaning of the street
   - Military
   - Political
   - Economic/Commerce
4. “Explore the city on your feet.”

Question 5

Cities are_____(three things).

Answer 5

1. Intimate and intrusive
2. Symbolize public life
3. Shared, but contested

Question 6

What was Haussman’s summation of Paris?

Answer 6

1. Haussmann envisioned the new roads as arteries in an urban circulatory system
2. The new boulevards would enable traffic to flow through the city
3. The boulevards would provide breathing spaces
4. Designed to stimulate business activity
5. Pacification of the masses desire for work
6. The boulevards had a militaristic value
7. Designed with movement in mind

Question 7

The boulevards created new economic, social and aesthetic bases – which in turn brought __________. At the street level, the boulevards were lined with small businesses and sidewalk cafes. They were lined with benches, lush with trees and with monuments at their ends. Pedestrian crosses were installed allowing local movement to be separated from through traffic. In short, promenading on these boulevards was a ________. They brought people out ________________________.

Answer 7

1. Large numbers of people together
2. visual and sensual experience
3. of their homes, and took them to places they would not have normally visited… to experience the drunken giddiness with their feet as well as their eyes.

Question 8

In Manhattan, Broadway was the______.

Answer 8

Pivot that seemed to draw all human life together

Question 9

Once a country lane lined with farms, pigs and inns, Broadway helps define the -_________ of New York as farms were converted into clothing factories, inns changed into hotels and theaters.

Answer 9

Urbanization.

Question 10

The squares and circles found on Broadway were unlike the enclosed and protected squares of residential neighborhoods on Broadway.They were ______.

Answer 10

Open and often overrun.

Question 11

Broadway was a site of commerce, excitement, amusement and wonder, but there were also some negative aspects as well. What were these negative aspects?

Answer 11

It was also a place where people were pushed and tripped, robbed and worse. It was a place where prostitution was learned and enacted, where children were put to work, and where the homeless took on a visible presence and then were forcibly removed.

Question 12

What did Broadway become?

Answer 12

It became a focal point of urban life (as it became New York’s first central boulevard). For many, it embraces the entire complex scale of modern life in the city. It was suitable for collective ceremony. It was a street that demonstrated the power of interest groups in the city. It was a place where people scrutinized values.

Question 13

The largest classroom was_______.

Answer 13

The city itself. The streets taught us the deceits of commerce, introduced us to the excitements of sex, schooled us in strategies of survival and gave us our first clear idea of what life in America was going to be like.

Question 14

What are the consequences of devaluing the street?

Answer 14

Once public life in New York was lived largely on the street. The street was the center, the heart of the public realm, and what had always made the city profoundly different from the places it now seems to want to resemble. This was when a notion of community was expressed in great physical places that were open to everyone and were intended to be shared.

Question 15

The distinctive feature of nineteenth century urbanism was the ______.

Answer 15

Boulevard. It brought explosive forces together.

Question 16

The legacy of the twentieth-century has been the ________.

Answer 16

Highway. It destroyed the very urban life that the boulevard created. This is the world of parking lots, underground parking garages, monitored and controlled malls, the sterilized space of the lobby, the space eating cloverleaf, the suburban stadium surrounded by a mass of concrete.

Question 17

The highway helps to produce a vision of the street that is seen to be solely a space for _______.

Answer 17

Traffic, a pathway for cars, not people, as the thing outside our houses that allows us to get from point A to B.