All of us grew up in places where we see how public space acts as a social glue. It is a space where the public can experience, values, history, interests and culture together. Public spaces give all of us a chance to relax after our busy lifestyles. It is a space where we can hang out, eat, play, show our culture or just simply sit on the benches and relax. Mike Davis’ chapter “ Fortress L.A.,” from City of Quartz, uses a prose style in describing how reconstruction in Los Angeles was made in a sense to improve the public spaces but, it changed public spaces drastically. The urban designers redeveloped Love Park, by claiming reconstructions can make park more tremendous vista. In certain cases, redevelopments of the public spaces can …show more content…
He states that, “The universal and ineluctable consequence of this crusade to secure the city is the destruction of accessible public space” (226). Davis’ views the public space as a place that is accessible to everyone and can be enjoyed freely. In “Fortress L.A”, Davis links his perceptions about the public space with city planner of Central Park,Frederick Law Olmstead. He states Olmsted’s vision as “public landscapes and parks as social safety-valves, mixing classes and ethnicities in common (bourgeois) recreations and enjoyment(230). Olmsted vision is no more active because of the design deterrents …show more content…
These spaces are designed to segregate the rich and poor,“the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation”.The architects made designs which isolate the poor from the middle classes because most of the homeless used public spaces as their shelters. Davis talks about William Whyte, who emphasizes the value of public space in an urban setting can be calculated by checking whether there are convenient, comfortable places for pedestrians to sit.In Rapid Transit District's, the rich designed barrel-shaped bus bench, which has little surface. The purpose of such a design is to make homeless feel uncomfortable sleeping on there. Davis also mentions "bumproof" benches were widely introduced on the periphery of Skid Row. The “bumproof” benches are wave-shaped benches with central armrests made from slippery or buttock-numbing materials such as stainless steel were design to prevent the homeless from sleep in public.
Outdoor sprinklers were designed with the purpose of to drench unsuspecting sleepers such as homeless,drug dealers and prostitutes at random times during the night. This design was also copied by local businessmen to keep the homeless away from public space. Another design deterrent used to by the city was to refuse to provide public toilets. The famous Public Space in Philadelphia, Love Park, was recently reconstructed in order to make it more tremendous vista
The infrastructure in West Main Street is not dissimilar to City Road in regards to the street bollards which have been introduced to stop vehicles parking on the pavements. Pedestrian islands are another similarly regular sight throughout the street. (‘The Street’, 2009, Scene 1) Both these material things are there to ensure the safety and ease of pedestrians while drivers may find these a nuisance as they are restricted to the small amount of parking bays along the street instead of parking on the pavement for convenience, consequently resulting in an inequality amid the public. There is a steady flow of traffic through the street of which most are cars but there are a lot of busses as well. The busses seem to be in favour of...
After his completion of the Delaware Park and Parkway system with Calvert Vaux throughout Buffalo, New York, Frederick Law Olmsted declared Buffalo as “the best planned city, as to its streets, public places and grounds, in the United States, if not the world.” Inspired largely by the baroque styling of Paris, France, Olmstead wished to create a park within urban Buffalo but rather put the city of Buffalo in a park system. The parks were non-gated and easily accessible for all patrons creating an ever changing green space across an urban vista. Olmsted’s plan only added value to the existing urban fabric consisting of numerous natural and architectural landmarks. Buffalo had prized itself as a commercial and industrial hub at this time. It’s location on the Buffalo River and Lake Erie made it a viable center for railroads and grain-milling. After posting rapid population growth between the early 1800’s and 1950, reaching a high of 580,000 civilians within a metropolitan region of one million, one would be surprised to see the cities condition today. After posting 6 straight decades of population decline, the urban fabric that was once a center for industry and commerce has become like one of many rust belt cities that have struggled to remain proficient in the twenty-first century. The collapse of the grain-mill industry may have been the most crippling to Buffalo’s economy. Today the shorelines of the Buffalo River are besieged by the abandoned grain silos that once defined its skyline and are often in disarray. Shipping through Buffalo became obsolete with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway and the railways once vital to the harbor area were superseded by other forms of travel. For the last several decades, poverty, segregat...
Homeless people have to face hunger situations and other problems everyday of their life (Hunger and Homelessness 1). They have to sleep under the bridge, if they lost everything they had. Some who still have left something such as car; they manage to sleep in their car for shelter. Not everyone fits in the homeless shelter, so people also sleep by trashcan, on the street, or any place that they could find (“How Can You Help End Homelessness” 1).
The authors use of images is pertinent to arguing both sides of the article. Debating the point of preservation versus the use of such parks needs
This district was an immense center of bizarre entertainment for miners, entrepreneurs and sailors. After the 1906 earthquake, the city saw an opportunity to clean up the Barbary Coast, transforming it into an acceptable area for the everyday San Franciscans. The Barbary Coast evolves immensely throughout the decades to what we know nowadays as Chinatown, North Beach, and Jackson Square. We will mainly focus on North Beach, a district which preserves his roots and rebuild a new social and environmental determinism throughout the passage of time.
A waterfront area located in Philadelphia, known as Penn’s Landing, has become a central area of redevelopment over many decades. What used to be trees and shrubs has transformed into an area of hotels, museums, restaurants, casinos, stadiums, and much more. This 35-acre site has so much to offer and has become an important area of public space for anyone to visit and enjoy. Penn’s Landing is a public space that benefits the public by containing a mixture of residential life, entertainment, and retail that is supported by a long history of creation and redevelopment.
In Kasson’s Amusing the Million, the forms of resistance were not race related, however, were geared more towards social class and cultural norms. The parks, Coney Island more specifically, created a lifestyle in society as well as a change in morals and attitudes. Kasson stated that, “a self conscious elite of critics, ministers, educators, and reformers, drawn principally from the Protestant middle class of the urban Northeast,” made up the genteel reformers. (Kasson, p.4) These genteel reformers believed that life should be constructive as well as Victorian virtues maintained. Parks in the beginning were a result of the Victorian virtues they were created to allow constructive leisure for the middle class. The closest thing to a park during this point was New York’s Central Park and Chicago’s Columbian Exposition. The park was created for the middle class industrial workers. (Kasson, p.11) Politicians in New York, against the design of genteel reformers,
To appreciate a row house neighborhood, one must first look at the plan as a whole before looking at the individual blocks and houses. The city’s goal to build a neighborhood that can be seen as a singular unit is made clear in plan, at both a larger scale (the entire urban plan) and a smaller scale (the scheme of the individual houses). Around 1850, the city began to carve out blocks and streets, with the idea of orienting them around squares and small residential parks. This Victorian style plan organized rectangular blocks around rounded gardens and squares that separated the row houses from major streets. The emphasis on public spaces and gardens to provide relief from the ene...
Part of the reasons it was built is to appreciate how humans have regained freedom for themselves again, a priceless gift. The importance of freedom directly show in the geographical location of The Four Freedom Park. New York is one of the most prosperous city in America. It is the economic center with the highest price index around the world. The value of the location where The Four Freedom Park is built is tremendous. The contrast of the skyscrapers and the park located on the East River create a spatial moment of conflict. However, the conflict is only visible when one is at the park and look at the Manhattan. It is hardly to see that contraction when one is at the Manhattan city. As more and more skyscrapers keep building up in the city, the view of the park fades out. Just like how humans view freedom now, as humans start to forget how hard and how much they had sacrificed to regain freedom, they do not appreciate freedom anymore. Appreciation of Freedom is like the Four Freedom Park that start to fade out from humans
Central Park is a magnififcent urban wonder created by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux. The park includes a lake, a zoo, bird watching, trails, a picnic area, statues, ice skating, a mall, a conservatory garden. You can also ride the ponies, climb a castle, and watch Shakespeare. This famous park is deeply rooted and intertwined with the history of New York. In the 1840s the urbanization of Manhattan was on full swing. This motivated poet editor William Cullen Bryant and the landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing to do something about it. Their views gained widespread support from the public mostly due to the already magnificent parks in London and Paris. In 1856 most of the present day park was bought by the New York legislature.
Very few people would want to live in a place where they don’t have security. Whether it be in cities or subdivisions, Jacobs, if alive, would ascertain that there needs to be a sense of connectedness to maintain communal safety. Public living “bring[s] together people who do not know each other in an intimate, private social fashion and in most cases do not care to know each other in that fashion” (Jacobs 55). Now that families typically center themselves around suburban lifestyles, residents should understand that the same connections that Jacobs says were to be made in cities need to now be made in subdivisions. Jacobs was scared that with houses being spread out in the suburbs, little interaction between neighbors would take place. In order to avoid this, neighborhoods need to promote a sidewalk lifestyle that they currently do not (Jacobs 70). With Kotkin stressing how urban areas are no longer preferable places to raise a family, saying only seven percent of their populations are children, he lacks compassion for the transients that now inhabit cities. Undoubtedly, those who now inhabit the city should also feel safe in their environments. Nowadays, members of a city isolate themselves from interactions with other citizens making it difficult to establish a social
Jacobs views diversity as the number of ways in which limited areas of space are allocated, as opposed to having an inherent racial or cultural connotation. Jacobs emphasizes that various types of business and residences are the elements of prospering city neighborhoods. Jacobs begins to explore three main myths. These myths are arguments often cited by city planners against diversity. To begin, the first myth that Jacobs attempts to discredit is that diversity is unattractive. She repudiates this assertion by saying that the opposite is in fact true, in which homogeneity is unappealing. I believe that it is quite detrimental when city planners attempt to create a contrived atmosphere of diversity in order to conceal the existing homogeneity. This is accomplished by artificially building different shapes and styles of buildings to give outsiders the impression of diversity. Jacobs underscores the flaws of contrived diversity in the following excerpt:
This mid to late-19th century account of an early Victorian (English) public park illustrates the change of function and transformation of the Victorian public park from its original role as an upper-middle class observatory of Nature to its redefinition as this class' s social observatory of the lower classes. Between the years of 1840 and 1860, the public park's role in the eyes of England' s upper crust changed drastically due to the economic and political structure of Victorian England during this time and J.M. Milton's quote reflects this reality.
But how does one even begin to fathom what makes a public space worthy to the users and the city? Is it purely the design of the building? Or is it the function of the building? Or is it in fact how the function of the desired spaces and the vision of the designer work together to create the experience?
Walking down the streets of large cities it is common to see men, women, and sometimes even whole families laying beside buildings. Some people may ignore them and keep walking, some feel frightened, and some see the homeless as a human being and treat them like one. These people tend to be dirty, smelly, or they have a sad look that has overtaken their faces because of their struggle to survive. The people sleeping outside of buildings are homeless. Being homeless means not having anywhere to call home, although it also can mean living in a place that was never intended to house humans, such as a bus stop or a highway underpass. It is tempting to wedge the homeless together under a single label but there are an abundance of contrasting causes