Paper or Plastic??

Both Woodruff Park and the Search for Common Ground and The Use of Sidewalks- Safety bring up some relevant ideas. Both readings comment on how ‘improvements’ made to neighborhoods often end up being anything except good for said neighborhood. Although their reasons are different, neither Murphy Davis nor Jane Jacobs like that some areas are being torn down or renovated to create a more modern image. Jane Jacobs mentions that modern apartment complexes make a neighborhood less safe, because the “high-rent tenants... have not the remotest idea of who takes care of their street, or how.” These complexes give tenants the illusion of safety, but it is just that an illusion much like the illusion that visitors are given of Atlanta. The tenants and the visitors alike see the neighborhoods at face-value: they don’t look past any facades to see the real workings of the neighborhoods or the reality of what has happened to create a particular atmosphere. However, Jacobs and Davis don’t’ agree about the relevance of tourists and visitors. Jacobs insists that they are necessary to industry and to keeping streets safe, while Davis notes that a lot of destruction of neighborhoods has taken place in order to make areas seem nicer to visitors and tourists. Both writers have a valid point; tourists are needed to keep industry alive in cities, but gearing a city toward tourists to the point where its residents aren’t happy isn’t a good way to achieve the good image that the people in charge of renovations are hoping to project.

A city must consider its residents, all of its residents when making crucial decisions. Whether Atlanta likes it or not, some of its residents are homeless and must be provided for in a way that hopefully would give them a way to better their positions in life. Atlanta’s Woodruff Park didn’t have to be renovated into a concrete slab in order to keep the park from overflowing with homeless people and changing the park, like Murphy Davis said, doesn’t get rid of the reality of those homeless people. Creating a program to help get the homeless people off the street and out of the park, would solve a few problems at once. If this was done, the city would be happy because the homeless wouldn’t be loitering in public places, the neighborhood could be happy because the parks and other public places could be changed to become inviting and useful again, and the homeless people would be able to help themselves and possibly regain some of the many things they lost with their homes often including self-respect.

Jane Jacobs starts off by explaining that “streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs.” Although this makes sense, the streets and sidewalks can also be thought of as the arteries and veins of a city. The arties and veins are no less important than the vital organs, except that they like streets and sidewalks are channel that is used for important travel through the city. Antibodies in the bloodstream, much like the residents of a safe neighborhood, prevent harmful affects on the neighborhood.
Jane Jacobs’ streets represent the neighborhood itself, while some of Murphy Davis’s sidewalks represent only the façade. Both of these can be seen in various neighborhoods; there are neighborhoods that look perfect, but are really just plastic like the nice off-white plastic siding on each house parallel to the even sidewalk. Then there are neighborhoods with sidewalks that tell a story. One house might have chalked out stick people smudged onto the sidewalk by some younger children in the neighborhood and another part of the sidewalk might have tiny footprints in it from when that toddler down the street got away from his mother when the cement was still setting. Jane Jacobs reminds us of the feeling of a neighborhood and essentially a small community that looks out for its own and feels like an extended family.