Why Doesn’t My Street Have a Sidewalk?
Why don’t we have a sidewalk on my house’s side of the road? Why is this park closed at night? Who decides what gets built on this land? When will this infrastructure project get finished?
If these kinds of questions ever bounce through your head while you’re walking through your city, you’ve come to the right place. Through this blog, I aim to draw attention to the ways that we interact with our urban landscape and how decisions about that landscape (whether made by us or by “the government”) affect us and our communities every day.
I’m writing mainly out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and plan to use my experience in this city as a point for comparison with other cities and urban areas to draw conclusions and think about public space in the US and beyond.
What’s Already Being Talked About?
Some other people have already started these conversations, like City State Radio in Louisville, where they consider how environmental factors cities can make us experience them differently. In one post, they talk about how tree canopy over sidewalks can make a hot and humid city bearable to cross, while the lack of green space can make another that shouldn’t be that way a nightmare.
Other ways that we can think about our cities is by thinking about the people that need smart planning the most: women and people of color. Neither group has historically benefited from the way that cities are planned and laid out, perhaps least of all in parks and public spaces that are supposed to be for everyone but cater to few. The Happy City Publication strives to touch on those topics to talk about how changing the way that we interact in public space, with a little help from smarter design, can make cities better for everyone.
These blogs and more already gotten the ball rolling on discussing the ways that our urban landscape affects us (see my previous post discussing other blogs that have inspired me), and now it’s time to dive in.
So, Wait, Why Doesn’t My Street Have Sidewalk?
Well, there’s a few different reasons that might be. Here in Charlotte, the biggest one is that the city just didn’t require developers to put them in until recently, and that’s a pretty common theme across the US.
Thankfully, through an initiative started in 2011 in the city, the City Council adopted a policy to put a budget toward retro-fitting these areas. The thing is, in Charlotte, there’s a huge deficit created by decades of private developments going up all over the city, so it’s just going to take time and a continued cash flow, which ebbs and flows over as the government changes.
Chances are that if your neighbor has a sidewalk and you don’t, the company that built your house wasn’t required to build one and your city just hasn’t had the time or budget to get on it.
But, There’s Some Good News.
If you live in Charlotte, you can actually put in a request to the Charlotte city government to have your sidewalk outfitted. They have a lot of requests and certain areas are higher priority than others, but chances are that if you draw attention to your need, the city will get on it faster!
So, if you’re interested in these kinds of issues and more, stick along for the ride, and I’ll be back next week.
