Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space

by Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Renia Ehrenfeucht

Urban sidewalks, critical but undervalued public spaces, have been sites for political demonstrations and urban greening, promenades for the wealthy and the well-dressed, and shelterless shelters for the homeless. On sidewalks, decade after decade, urbanites have socialized, paraded, and played, sold their wares, and observed city life. These many uses often overlap and conflict, and urban residents and planners try to include some and exclude others. In this first book-length analysis of the sidewalk as a distinct public space, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris and Renia Ehrenfeucht examine the evolution of the American urban sidewalk and trace conflicts that have arisen over its competing uses. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples as well as case study research and archival data from five cities--Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, and Seattle--they discuss the characteristics of sidewalks as small urban public spaces, and such related issues as the ambiguous boundaries of their "public" status, contestation over specific uses, control and regulations, and the implications for First Amendment speech and assembly rights.

Genres: Nonfiction

328 pages, Hardcover

First published March 20, 2009

About the author

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is Professor of Urban Planning and Associate Provost for Academic Planning at UCLA. She is the coauthor of Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space (MIT Press) and other books. She is a leader of the Urban Humanities Initiative, a UCLA program sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Reviews

[Michael Lewyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first half of this book is the most interesting part. The authors show that sidewalks are not a recent invention; there were sidewalks in Turkey as early as 2000 BC, and sidewalks became common in England in the 1700s.

The authors also show how sidewalks have always been contested terrain. Just as city bureaucrats see streets primarily as a place where cars should travel without obstacles, they typically see sidewalks as a place where pedestrians should be able to travel rapidly and without obstacles. For example, bureaucrats often saw street vendors as obstacles to pedestrian circulation (and were spurred on by nearby merchants who saw them as unfair competition). The authors show that street vendors were as controversial a century ago as they are today- perhaps even more so.

The authors, by contrast, are more sympathetic to the desires of those who use sidewalks for other purposes: political demonstrators, street vendors, the homeless and panhandlers. They go further than I would like in this regard, asserting that "In diverse cities, the individual rights of some to participate in public spaces might violate others' sense of comfort." But a society that underestimates the need for public order risks what happened in the last half of the 20th century: after seeing urban areas become more and more disorderly (thanks in part to judges and legislators who shared the authors' egalitarian instincts) the middle class retreated to sidewalk-less suburbs.

The book ends with a discussion of street trees. Many urbanists think of street trees as an unambiguous good; however, the authors point out that trees can damage sidewalks and cost money to plant and tend.