OBE #5 Whose city, whose skywalk?
Sharon Zukin focuses on multiple aspects of current situations facing modern American cities. She heavily focuses on the dwindling culture shared across our cities, as well as the decay of urban public space. She looks at New York and the consequences she is seeing due to these changes. I’m going to take a look at the Twin Cities area and draw some comparisons between her findings in New York, and the area around Minneapolis.
I wanted to focus my observations somewhere around the city where I could simply watch the everyday interactions of the citizens and draw my conclusions. I decided to take my study to the overhead skywalks that line the spaces between downtown buildings. I then focused on Zukin’s two main points.
First, I looked at the issue of culture and its impact on society. The idea of culture is one that involves people from all walks of life. Nobody is cultureless, and everybody can share it in. However, there are many barriers to sharing in culture, which have negative effects. I feel the skyways put individuals in a world of isolation, where culture cannot reach. Someone walking in a skyway is incapable of hearing the music from the local club, seeing the paintings on display from a painter, or simply observing the everyday interactions associated with a city. Without having a reason to utilize the street, one can bypass everything about the city except for the direct path needed to return where you came from. Typically, a skyway is shared by a select demographic of individuals, usually sharing things like an occupation or a hungry stomach. The “culture” you receive while inside a skyway is minimal at best simply due to the lack of connectivity to your surrounds.
Zukin also takes a look at public space, and how major corporations are privatizing the surrounding places. Skyways are a very interesting aspect of public space, which have also been highly privatized. Although usually not “private,” skyways certainly create a sense of class separation. As mentioned above, a specific spread of people seems to occupy skyways. Rarely do you see lower class people, poor individuals, or immigrants throughout the skyway system. More typical is the middle class, white, business person, either to or from work, or seeking the nearest food source. With this, you invisibly put restrictions on who can and cannot use these walkways. As with Jane Jacobs, Zukin is a big proponent to what she calls “My City,” and believes that interactions create a “social theater” for others to partake. Both Jacobs and Zukin would find the skyway system detrimental to the interpersonal connections needed for a fully functioning city.
While looking at skyways, it is clear that they create a different sense than the street does 15 feet below. The glass-enclosed structure does more than simply providing personal transportation for individuals, be it intentional or not. Zukin would argue that the privatizing of this public space hurts the social economy of our city, while pushing culture further away from the individuals that use them.