The Sunnyvale Sun

Letters & Opinions

Sunnyvale resident reminded of the late author Jane Jacobs

By RACHEL KORTE

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, author Jane Jacobs writes that lively, healthy city neighborhoods are messy, organic places. They have "short blocks" to increase foot traffic at all hours, helping decrease crime since many eyes are always watching the street.

Multiple, "mixed primary" uses of shops, restaurants, workplaces and homes exist in a concentrated density, also increasing foot traffic (and eyes).

A mix of both old and new buildings injects additional vigor. Large enterprises, such as corporations and opera houses, pay off the high construction costs of new buildings, while old buildings with lower rents nurture small, diverse businesses such as bookstores, antiques dealers and pastry shops.

In contrast, traditional city planners, Jacobs despairs, try to cage people in a social utopia. New housing developments face inward over courtyards, turning occupants' eyes away from the streets. Civic centers, sequestered away from a diversity of businesses, "are avoided by everyone but bums."

Carefully planned "open spaces" face the backs, not the fronts, of thriving streets and businesses, and "promenades ... go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders."

Jacobs' book, at her insistence, is meant to apply only to "great cities," not to towns, suburbs or "little cities" like Sunnyvale. But some of the follies she observes in large city planning can be found almost anywhere.

I am reminded of Jacobs' book on Wednesday nights when I take (drive) my 1-year-old to Sunnyvale's weekly summer evenings of food, music and shopping.

Specifically, I think of her when I retrieve our mail at the post office.

To get to the post office, I cut diagonally across that strange, concrete "open space" with the amphitheater-style circle, ringed by empty ledges presumably for sitting that, with their notched edges, repel even skateboarding life. It is decorated by a metal lattice "roof" with no covering for shade or rain.

Jacobs, who died earlier this year, would have had fun with the ubiquitous "open" roofs of these newer public works. I liken them to California's proud boast: "We have little rain! Our uncovered roofs mock the sky!" But nobody stands beneath them to hear.

What a contrast between this great, lifeless monument to good intentions, and the thriving, beat-drumming, busy footwork going on at Murphy Street only one block away.

Whether the downtown redevelopment will much change the flow through this "amphitheater" space, other than the stage for outdoor performances it is someday meant to be, I suspect it will continue to be abandoned by everyday human life. Even in busy shopping areas, when directly fronted by shops, these circular powwows are stubbornly avoided by human footfalls like a river around an island.

Soon enough, I sighed (my 1-year old's eyes glazing over as we traipsed across the great, cement expanse, vainly "cheered up" by brightly colored fruit sculptures), there will be vagrants here, too, accosting passersby just as they do on the green above the parking garage in San Francisco's Civic Center.

After the recent contention between Sunnyvale and the downtown developer, I wonder: Will we lose sight of the greater picture? Will we vacillate wildly between squabbling and a euphoric social utopia?

Or will we remember how people really live, work, and walk--and not how we'd rather they do?

Will we resist the urge to blindly eschew the old or blindly eschew the new?

Rachel Korte is a resident of Sunnyvale.