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(no photography, no begging , no spontaneous activities, transgressing their functional
frames). However, for many city dwellers or consumers, because they appear in that
role, these facilities form the essence of citiness (urbanity), they provide them with enter-
tainment, sometimes with magic or ecstatic impressions and feelings. These places are
also relatively safe, with regards to crime, robbery and theft. Within heavily surveyed ar-
eas within stations or shopping malls the amount of petty theft has been reduced sub-
stantially, typically there are no cases of murder or rape reported. Security is ensured by
the ease of spotting and tracing potential suspects, and, in case of crime, detecting per-
petrators. For criminals, space which is brightly illuminated, clean and well kept, with no
trash and graffiti on the wall is a deterrent131.
In open public spaces of city streets, plazas and parks, people are more often exposed to
crime, distortion of poverty, drug abuse and prostitution, acts of hooliganism, and are
subject to public menace violence perpetrated by frustrated and aggressive social
groups. Examples of this are football fan brawls, street gang fights or bloody riots. The
public space previously the agora and forum nowadays has become the stage of
social conflict.
3. THE CRISIS OF DOWNTOWN STREET
This phenomenon, the atrophy of the public space, is being followed by the crisis of the
downtown street. The root of this problem lies in the rapid processes of urbanization,
suburbanization and the development of public and private modes of transport. The rich-
est citizens have left the city and have moved into suburban estates, city centers are
becoming empty and neglected areas. Busy and lively streets are becoming roads
packed with cars, cities being cut off by high speed motorways.
Streets are the salons of society - Walter Benjamin wrote the community is always busy
and restless, living, feeling, exploring and experiencing between city walls, as individuals
do between home walls. For the community shining shop windows are adornments as
beautiful as oil canvases, hanging at the bourgeois salons. City walls and advertisements
127
Automated Socio-Technical Environments (ASTEs) was decribed by M.Lianos and M.Douglas ; Dangeriza-
tion and the end of deviance : The Institutional Environment [in:] British Journal of Criminology, 40, p. 261-78.
128
Re: Augé 1999, s. 32.
129
Ghirardo 1999, p. 43.
130
Ritzer 2004, p. 23-49
131
Racoń-Leja 2004, p. 247.
ARTUR JASICSKI, Wielkomiejski dylemat przestrzeń publiczna czy przestrzeń bezpieczna 345
are its readings stands, newsagents are libraries, post boxes are bronzes, benches are
bedroom furnishings, cafe terraces are balconies, from which the community supervises
the life of its home132.
In 1961 Jane Jacobs noticed that daily, colorful life is vanishing from the streets of Ameri-
can towns, pavements are emptying and the feeling of safety and security is decreasing.
Instead of being an urban oasis, downtown was developing into an urban jungle. She saw
the city street scene as a battlefield between the drama of civilization versus barbarism:
the bedrock attribute of a successful city district is that a person must feel personally safe
and secure on the streets among all these strangers133. She noticed that public peace is
not kept primarily by the police It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious,
network of voluntary controls and standards among the people themselves, and enforced
by the people themselves134. In some city areas where law and order depends mostly on
police actions we have the city jungle situation, because no number of policemen can
enforce civilization where the normal, casual enforcement of it has broken down.
Jacobs voted for the city to be constructed according to traditional and tested codes, she
urged the rejection of the modernistic rule of spatial functional zoning, she incited the
creation of the traditional, multifunctional city with a dense street pattern, filled with build-
ings of different ages and structures, with a high population density, which according to
her should support traditional and safe city space, based on the concept of the street,
which provides mutual contact, the feeling of safety enforces social bonds, and is condu-
cive to social contacts.
Jacobs ideas, based on the traditional understanding of the city and its functions and
related to historical patterns, are still followed and developed by different platforms and
initiatives. These include the New Urbanism movement, the Smart Growth135 idea of inte-
grating and consolidating the city, and the organization Project For Public Places, estab-
lished in 1975, by William Holy White, whose mission is to create better places: either
open public spaces, plazas and parks, or public buildings and facilities. In his book The
Social Life of Small Urban Spaces William H. White describes the close relationship be-
tween the quality of space and social activity, proving that even minor changes can lead
to a better life for the city dwellers.
In Europe, a prominent representative of New Urbanism is Danish architect Jan Gehl,
who has, for over twenty years, introduced and verified his ideas on the streets of Co-
penhagen. In his book New City Life, published in 2006, he claims that the contemporary
city undergoes major transformation, the function-oriented organism is surpassed and
dominated by city-life oriented towards recreation and consumerism. In the past, the
presence of people in the city was primarily motivated by necessity, today they want to
enjoy municipal life and the attractions it provides, they want to and can afford it. Today,
as was happening one hundred years ago, more or less the same free pleasures att-
ract and motivate them: diversity and sensory impressions and opportunities to meet
other people.
Gehl claims that the quality of city space determines the quality of city life, and that spe-
cial attention should therefore be given to city streets, parks and plazas, old ones as well
as new. City streets were initially built for pedestrians, then they were rebuilt to suite the
needs of the car. He urges the reclamation of them back for pedestrians, in order to re-
store city life to them again. He shows many successful examples of such transition con-
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