Assignment #1: Summary of a Text
Cover Memo:
● What do you feel is working particularly well in this draft?
I personally feel like I covered the most important points brought up by Jane Jacobs in the text, not only
summarizing her main argument and sub-arguments, but also adding the primary examples she used to
support her ideas.
I also like how concise my writing is (I didn’t go over the word limit which is surprising because I always
do). Despite having a limit, I still managed to pinpoint Jane’s main ideas and capture the spirit of Jane
Jacob’s argument.
● What did you learn about your own writing process as you drafted?
I noticed that I prefer to nail down and complete my essays perfectly in one go rather than have many
drafts and revise them each time. When I tried to take a break while writing, I found it very difficult to get
back to continuing my draft again. I think this is because I don’t want my thought process to be disrupted
and would rather my thoughts flow naturally while I’m at it.
● What are some aspects of this draft you are still struggling with?
I feel there is a slight lack of analysis (explaining how the evidence/ examples support the overarching
argument). This is mainly because of limited space. I have a tendency to want to include everything the
author mentions, even though it should not be prioritized or even mentioned. Thus, for my second draft, I
might work on cutting down examples that may not support my summary.
● What kinds of feedback would be helpful for you?
I want to review:
- What is missing (in terms of content)
- Are there any areas that I focused too much (overkill)/ too little (underrepresent) on?
- How can I increase the analysis of examples and statistics and link them to how they support
Jane’s arguments?
“The uses of sidewalks: safety” in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” by Jane
Jacobs provides a unique insight into the urban design battle of the '60s (Jacobs, 1961). As a
resident of Greenwich Village, Jacobs strongly opposed urban-planner Robert Moses’ agenda to
overhaul her neighborhood for the purpose of ‘urban renewal,’ and she started campaigning against
the top-down approach to city planning. Jane believed in the preservation of local neighborhoods
and villages because of their importance in maintaining tight-knit and diverse communities. In this
excerpt, she argues that certain “principles” of good urban planning, especially having busy streets
and sidewalks, would ensure citizens' security and utility.
As seen by Jacobs, sidewalks, and streets are crucial in keeping cities functional as a large
number of people, whether it be strangers or residents, use them. She describes the problem of
unsafe cities as irremediable by police or reallocating populations because the urban fabric is
maintained by a natural network of controls and standards enforced by the people. Here, she gives
statistics of the prevalent crime in Los Angeles (its forcible rape rate being over twice as high as
St. Louis and Philadelphia in 1958) despite having mostly suburban streets. Jacobs ties this
evidence back to her proposition that solutions to physically change the city will not work so long
as streets lack three fundamental qualities. These fundamental qualities consist of maintaining a
clear distinction between public and private space, having “eyes upon/ “the natural proprietors of”
the street, and having users on streets consistently. To support her point, Jane uses first-hand
evidence (quasi-interview), quoting Havey’s (director of the North End Union) remarks about his
neighborhood’s lack of crime and the prevention of criminal efforts by pedestrians, store owners,
and residents. She also utilizes an example of an incident in the Washington Houses public housing
project in New York (NY), where a Christmas tree placed in the “inner street” was stolen while
the trees on the busy corners of time were not.
Furthering her claim, Jacobs posits that streets must be used by everyone, users and mere
watchers, to attain natural surveillance. People observe their surroundings when they engage in
daily activities in stores like restaurants and public areas, whose diversity and business attract even
more people to the streets. Using a personal anecdote, Jacob tells us how the shopkeepers of the
butchery and delicatessen, the locksmith, the fruit and laundry man, and men from the bar in her
neighborhood collectively stopped a man from forcing a girl to go with him. However, no one
from the newly-built high-rent apartment noticed the incident. Jacobs concludes that social
cohesion and community involvement are present in connected neighborhoods more than in
modern buildings since the safest sidewalks in NYC are situated in poorer regions.
In the final portion, Jacobs voices her concern for the increasing modernization of highrise building projects, claiming them to be inaccessible to the public and thus lack checks and
balances of eyes from streets. Using the Hyde Park-Kenwood renewal project as a case study, she
brings attention to problems such as negligence of security, displacing people, and cultivating Turf
(physical divisions inside cities), that arose as a result of poor planning. Jane ends the chapter with
rather uplifting observations of her village that she saved from destruction and draws an analogy
of how the workings of cities are like that of a ballet act, where each individual and part makes up
the intricate progression of the dance.
From a meta-perspective, Jane equating “eyes on the street” to city safety is, in my opinion,
an overly simplistic generalization, especially when she does not use convincing scientific methods
to prove her argument. Most of the anecdotes and statistics she uses do not establish clear causation
and are mainly based on her experiences in NY. Additionally, Jane doesn’t consider the systematic
reasons for street crime or the modern challenges the booming population poses for city planning.
I would appreciate it if she explored those aspects more.
Bibliography:
Jacobs, Jane. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York, NY: Vintage Books.