Essay Example on Place-Making: Enhancing Community Health, Wellbeing & Happiness

Introduction

Place-making refers to the process of designing and managing public spaces. Place-making makes use of the assets available to the community to create public spaces that enhance the health, wellbeing, and happiness of the people. Generally, place-making improves neighborhoods and cities and also inspires the inhabitants to reimagine and reinvent their public spaces. Other than promoting urban designs, place-making also helps incorporate cultural, physical, political, and social identities to public spaces. While most attention is given to public squares and parks, sidewalks are also public spaces that contribute significantly to the social and cultural identity of cities and communities. Sidewalks are an important part of any city. Other than being conduits for movement and access to pedestrians, they also promote walking and enhance connectivity. As public spaces, they are the front steps to any city and helps activate the streets both culturally, economically, and socially.

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Sidewalks in American cities have a long and complicated history. In the 19th and 20th centuries, their use was less restricted, and hence a vibrant culture grew. However, as restrictions got introduced, the use of sidewalks was reduced to only pedestrianism. In recent years, planners have been trying to bring back life into pedestrians, but several challenges have often hampered their efforts. As the planners were fighting to bring back the vibrant culture to sidewalks, another cultural assault happened; the number of e-scooters in American cities exploded. While sidewalks have been used exclusively by pedestrians over the decades, the rise in the use of e-scooters in cities has led to a clash between the two users. In Dallas, a couple of pedestrians have been injured by e-scooters leading to calls for enactment of legislation to regulate the use of e-scooters in the sidewalks. These events have instilled fear in pedestrians, and hence it is unlikely that the vibrant sidewalk culture will be revived. In this light, this paper seeks to explore the evolution of sidewalk culture of the years and the recent clash between pedestrians and e-scooters on the use of sidewalks as public spaces in Dallas. The paper will be divided into two sections. The first part of the paper will discuss the importance of sidewalks as public spaces. The cultural evolution of the uses of sidewalks through history will also be discussed in this section. The second section of the paper will focus on the rising conflict on the use of sidewalks between pedestrians and e-scooters and what it means for the efforts to revive the once vibrant sidewalk culture.

The Social and Cultural Importance of Sidewalks

As mentioned in the introduction, sidewalks are not just conduits to move pedestrians from one place to another. Instead, they are also places that enable people to abide, meet, and participate in various aspects of neighborhood life. It is on the sidewalks that people experience city life without any confinements and take in the neighborhood rhythms. Ideally, sidewalks should support movement, confrontation, survival, encounter, and beauty (Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2010). Under movement, sidewalks must be safe for use by all kinds of pedestrians and for different purposes. Supporting encounter helps city residents meet friends and acquaintances, observe neighbors, and freely mix with strangers. American sidewalks have been historically used for confrontational purposes. For instance, the refusal by African-Americans to step aside on sidewalks was a strong form of expression. Several groups of people, such as the street vendors and the homeless, also depend on the sidewalks for survival. This must be promoted. Finally, sidewalks make the cities more beautiful.The Social and Cultural evolution of Sidewalks

Pedestrianism is the most prominent use of sidewalks in America today. People moving on foot, wheelchairs, and other mobility devices such as e-scooters, are all that one encounters in sidewalks. However, this is just one dimension of sidewalk experience. In cities in other parts of the world such as Europe and Asia, sidewalks are multi-use environments and not just pure pedestrian thoroughfares. It is worth noting, however, that this has not always been the case in American cities.

The 19th and Early 20th Century

In the 19th as well as the early 20th century, sidewalks were more vibrant spaces than they are today (Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2010). Curbs and sidewalks became prominent in the 19th century. By the end of the century, they had become an important aspect of urban infrastructure. At this time, sidewalks were the easiest places to walk and carry out various social and economic activities. In the commercial areas of the cities, sidewalks were commonly used as extensions of the shops. Friends and acquaintances would also meet and socialize on the sidewalks. In this aspect, aspects were both the route and the destination. They allowed people to move through the city and also served as a space for commerce, civic engagement, and social interaction. The lack of restrictions promoted the vibrant sidewalk culture. This is the culture that Jane Jacobs describes in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities when she claims that crowded streets and sidewalks are just as important as beautiful architecture. She termed the culture of interacting and depending on each other sidewalk ballet (Jacobs, 2016).

The Last Half of the 20th Century

However, this changed when policymakers began treating sidewalks entirely as transportation infrastructure. In this spirit, they restricted various activities along sidewalks such as vending, socializing, public speaking, and loitering. These changes ultimately sucked life and vitality out of sidewalks. Later policies would also favor motorists over pedestrians, further making walking less favorable. Moreover, the redefinition of sidewalks as exclusive transportation corridors led to the restriction or prohibition of any activities that impeded the circulation of pedestrians. Resultantly, sidewalks were used for much fewer activities by the mid-20th century, and social life shifted to more controlled environments such as malls (Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2010). While recent studies have emphasized the need for people to walk, most cities around the country still implement policies meant to devalue sidewalks such as the development of elevated walk-ways and privatization of various sidewalks. While planners have tried to bring back vibrancy into sidewalks, they have faced challenges since city dwellers only focus on the pedestrianism dimension of sidewalks. This shift in the social use of the sidewalk occurred as a result of the policies enacted and implemented in the 20th century. The restrictions led to a change in culture, and people no longer see sidewalks as places to socialize, as it was in the 19th century.

The 21st Century

The evolution of the social and cultural use of sidewalks has not stopped yet. Today, though pedestrianism remains the primary use of sidewalks in American cities, there are visible changes taking place. Most prominently, there have been calls to make sidewalks more user-centered. Different groups of people have been pushing to make sidewalks more friendly to different types of users. Sidewalk designs are increasingly seeking to satisfy users with special needs and become more responsive to emergency response scenarios. The commuters demand that sidewalks should provide direct and well-maintained routes to ensure quick and unencumbered walk. On their side, amblers seek serendipitous encounters with business prospects and neighbors. Business owners want sidewalks to offer better visibility and access as well as efficient deliveries. Finally, utility companies demand that the design of sidewalks should give priority to access to controls such as streetlights, electric switches, and cable repair (Loukaitou-Sideris & Ehrenfeucht, 2010). Looking at it from this perspective, there appears to be a scramble for the sidewalks in the American cities. The competition for use has led to conflicts between users, as discussed below. Notably, there is a clash between pedestrians and e-scooters that is threatening to transform the use of sidewalks completely. The City of Dallas will be used to discuss this clash further.

The Silent Battle for the Sidewalks of Dallas

Generally, the sidewalks in Dallas are well-maintained and well-planned, factors that help improve interactions within neighborhoods. Just like in the rest of America, pedestrianism is the most prominent use of sidewalks in Dallas. The walkability of sidewalks in some parts of the city, such as Oak Lawn, Henderson, and Downtown Dallas is excellent. However, there is still a need to prioritize sidewalk culture in the city (Dallas Morning News Editorial, 2018). In recent years, the city has experienced an explosion in the number of people using e-scooters. The city's laws allow the use of e-scooters on city-owned properties such as trails, streets, public paths, and sidewalks. Some of the e-scooter companies permitted to operate in the city include Lime and Bird (Basnet, 2018). It is estimated that there are more than 13,000 e-scooters in the city (Norimine, 2019).

While e-scooters are fun to use and have been lauded for reducing pollution, they pose huge safety risks to both the riders and pedestrians. Scooters usually go at 15mph. For riders, the higher the speed, the more the fun. On the other hand, pedestrians walk at 3-4 mph. As such, the pedestrian is always the loser in the case of a collision. For instance, a Dallas woman recently sustained head injuries in an e-scooter accident (Sallis, 2018). Scooters are also commonly left clattered in the sidewalks posing more danger to pedestrians. In response to these incidents, the authorities considered legislation to regulate and restrict the use of e-scooters. Though there exist laws restricting the use of scooters as well as other rideables on the sidewalks, most users ignore them. Recently Dallas Police have expressed the need to stop the city's growing freewheeling scooter culture, which has mostly been caused by a lack of enforcement of the existing laws. They are also pushing for new regulations, such as the use of GPS to restrict the use of e-scooters in banned places (Norimine, 2019). Beneath the clash between the pedestrians and e-scooters lies a more grave concern. As the e-scooters seem to have the upper hand in this clash, sidewalks in Dallas and other major cities in the country may be dying a slow death. Resultantly, the cultural and social aspects of sidewalks may never be restored.

The Cultural and Social Impacts of E-Scooters

As intimated earlier, pedestrians are the life of sidewalks. Without pedestrians, sidewalks would be boring, and the cultural and social aspects of these public spaces would die (Nelson, 2016). Unfortunately, this is exactly what scooters are doing. Out of nowhere, hundreds of e-scooters have taken over sidewalks in Dallas. They also have visibly clogged sidewalks that have been getting narrower and narrower over the years. Looking at the current situation, it is difficult to recall a time in history when strolling along the sidewalks in Dallas was more nerve-wracking. The situation is aggravated by the increasing number of accidents caused by e-scooters. While listing the purposes of sidewalks,...