Temporary Appropriation Paper

Urban planning is an important aspect of city life, especially in light of today’s dynamic economy and environment. With increasing levels of crime, pollution, and environmental degradation, many cities are looking for new solutions to solve these. Large influences on the ideas that are shaping urban planning today come from urban theorist, Jane Jacobs. Jacobs challenged the way urban planners, architects, urban designer and sociologist thought about cities. In order to solve “the kind of problem which cities pose”, Jacobs promotes the idea of the use of sidewalks includes three majors. It is about city sidewalk safety and sidewalk contacts. Jacobs wrote that “there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” Through analyzing and observing such things as city streets and sidewalks, neighborhood parks within a city and what Jacobs refers to as “the four generators of diversity”, Jacobs has developed theories that can guide city planners, architects, urban designer and most

Jacob’s (1993) introduction defines the “attack” mode that is needed to promote new urban planning projects, which will be necessary to create dynamic and sustainable urban city planning in the 20th century. The underlying problem of capitalistic motives for urban planning often neglects to create hospitable and sustainable building projects, which benefit the greater good of the community: “price tags are fastened onto the population” (Jacobs 8). This is why the concept of mutual and collection “support” of dynamic and balanced urban development better serves the community without the commoditization of human life associated with urban real estate projects. In Chapter Two: The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety is focused on the vital role the sidewalks

New York City is just like every other major city in the United States. New York City crime rate is the main reason why people are moving out of the city that they call home. American’s believe that a civil decent society is a place where they can receive an education, and have access to things in life such a life, liberty and freedom. According to United States of America (1994), Public spaces are among New York City’s greatest assets. The city’s parks, playgrounds, streets, avenues, stoops and plazas are the forums that make possible the sense of vitality, excitement, and community that are the pulse of urban life. As time goes by these places have be ruined by environment problems such as eye sore graffiti, prostitution, unnecessary panhandling and people in the street intoxicated. When a city have these types of problems, the citizen feel as if they cannot protect their children because of the environment. Fear caused by disorder makes people leave the cities and communities that they reside in.

The world has been evolving as quickly as the population has grown. As the years progressed, the habitual lifestyle has transformed from spread out house and land living to city and suburban occupation. Along with the living style, cities have progressed from just roads and buildings to multifunctional spaces with copious possibilities. Federation Square in the ‘heart of the city’ is an example of how a space in the city vastly contributes to the visual culture of Melbourne. Times Square in New York also displays how what was previously an intersection of roads, has been transformed into a visual landmark. Melbourne city had always lacked a functional public space ever since its birth.

Cities are generators of economic life and source of changes in the world. Thereby, Jane Jacobs in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities puts into relief the role of cities on the social and economic levels, while denouncing the disastrous consequences of urban renewal programs. To that extent, in chapters 2 and 3, she discusses "The Uses of Sidewalks”, arguing that over all people need safety and trust in their city. Therefore, first she claims the necessity of keeping streets and sidewalks safe because they are the “vital organs” of cities (29). Secondly, she argues that the functioning of cities should be organized in order to foster human interaction in which “casual public

The Urban Age is the current age where we are living now as the majority of human population is living within an urban settlement or urban environment such as cities, towns and slums. With the rapid increase of urbanization, the demand for private and public spaces is growing. Private spaces falls under things such as houses, apartment and office spaces. Whilst while the public are things such as public municipal parks, public malls and community oval. The issue that is being shined upon in this essay within our current cities spaces is the ever growing privatization of public spaces. Bradley L Garret a journalist for the guardian wrote an article on how cities such as Los Angeles has become a victim of this and he emphasizes the fact that

Medieval cities with their dense building-locked plazas and narrow alleys give a different perception of space than the modern planned outdoor plaza. These cities and towns were often self-evolved, carved over by uses. With dense living conditions leading to dark homes, the external spaces were designed for people to remain outdoors, making social contact on the street or square imminent as the houses often lacked light. The spaces, since self-mutated in time. Their scales varied, but they succeeded in creating fluid, elastic and malleable outdoor in-betweens which sometimes had unprogrammed enclosures, later defined by usage. The self-evolvement over time can be described as one of the reason in creating the medieval city and its extremely

Open space can serve recreational areas for residents and helps to enhance the environmental and aesthetic quality of neighborhoods. As we know, there are a lot of studies showing that proximity to open space increases property values. It seems to cause long-time residents being priced out of their neighborhoods. Thus, open space is a double-edged sword. It could improve quality of life and impose the pressure of living on people.

The contribution of this project to practices or a wider field of study will be positioned as an open exploration to expand the understandings of the human dimension in public space. Further, it aligns with the argument to situate city space to return the embodiment of physicality and senses of the human body. Lastly, the project purposes as an open discussion and new perceptions towards pedestrians or practices, to participate and discover innumerable potentialities for the future public

Physical space can inform researchers on how people interact with that space, and influence social behavior. Applied anthropologists have a very important tool in their practitioner’s toolkit that allows them to disseminate behavior, actions, and help create spaces that will meet the needs of the population using ethnography. Ethnography allows practitioners to use their observational skills to improve the design of a product, landscape, environment, or assist with an infrastructural design based on the needs of the individuals that will access such facilities (Rijsberman 2012). To do so, it is extremely important to know the impact of physical surroundings and environmental behavior and understand that environments have a strong influence on people’s interaction with the physical landscape.

With the help of public art, dull and tired environments are transformed to inspire the community of people working and living there. When the government pays an

In present-day America, historic preservation is not just for the historic home, but rather a component of “smart growth;” which utilizes space in cities where buildings have already been established. With businesses closing, cities feel the crippling effects on its economy and with that consideration in mind; cities can reinvent themselves with the abandoned spaces for city growth through adaptive reuse. To find out just how beneficial using the abandoned buildings, further research needs to be conducted on the movements associated with historic preservation using adaptive reuse. These elements will help provide evidence or lack thereof that historic preservation is actually a form of “smart growth.” Based on the observations from the historic districts in cities like Charleston, South Carolina, I believe historic preservation is a form of “smart growth” due to the adaptive reuse of current buildings (i.e. Warehouse becomes lofts and businesses).

Space that is documented and utilized by humans, whether directly or indirectly, takes on a basic level of social utility and cultural construction. As Elias Canetti would suggest, the prospect of touch carries with it the risk of being taken and subsequently assimilated or digested (1). The predecessors to the first great urban parks in the United States, namely country estates, cemeteries, and town squares or plazas, all contribute some aesthetic and related ideological basis for a newly emerging discourse of urban parks. Parks were seen as the “poor-man’s countryside,” in reference to the country estates of the wealthy. Also, cemeteries were the first naturalistic open spaces consistently built within urban boundaries. The idea of the commons and town square is perhaps the most telling predecessor of the city park.

There is no doubt that the world population is growing and growing rapidly but in order for the world to hold the mass change there is a need for humanity to adapt. According to the UN (United Nations) more than half of humanity today 3.9 billion people in 2014, today over 4 billion lives in urban areas (UN 2014, p. 1).This is a profound shift in the course of one century, or within a single lifetime for some of the longer lived people. Not only is the world’s urban population rapidly increasing, but cities themselves are growing larger and larger, with the number of “megacities” (population at least 10 million) almost tripling from 10 in 1990 to 28 in 2014 (UN 2014, p. 13). To first understand how such mega urbanity affects humanity one first needs to understand what a Megacity is. Once one understands this concept they will be able to indicate what the development of cities and our urban past have to say for urban future, understand the concept of a city and its history, be able to explain the urban way of life associated with cities and finally be able to assess the challenges and changes that cities and urban life face in modern day.

Designing a city from scratch is a remarkable thought experiment but ultimately fails at implementation because we always approach it from the perspective of “how can we create a new city that solves problems of existing cities.” It’s less a process driven by design and more by critique. Urban living has paved its way into modern society, yet the vision for a city has changed over time. Large settlements need planning to grow; yet differences in minds is what leads to the modifications of a city, in return makes a city so unique. Alterations in opinions are what thrives urban life, still these differences are what skews the view of how others see a city compared to myself. They say the eye of the beholder deems beauty; this could explain