ABSTRACT
The Death and Life of Great American Cities hit the world of city planning like an earthquake when it appeared in 1961. Streets in cities serve many purposes besides carrying vehicles, and city sidewalks, the pedestrian parts of the streets, serve many purposes besides carrying pedestrians. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place. To keep city safe is a fundamental task of a city's streets and its sidewalks. The bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe and secure on the street among all the strangers. Today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it has, which comes to much the same thing in end. The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers.
