Was Ford Prefect Right?

At the beginning of The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Ford Prefect recounts how he met Arthur Dent, the protagonist. Ford Prefect is an alien, and when he first came to Earth, he tried to introduce himself to a car because he thought they were the dominant species. Arthur saved him by pushing him out of the path of the speeding car.

This picture is from right across from where I work In the suburbs. Look at the land use! Look at those parking lots! More space is explicitly delegated to cars than to people. There are no walkways for pedestrians; if you walk through or across the entry, you look and feel like a pest because you aren’t in a car. The suburbs are littered with places like this.

It makes you think Ford Prefect was right.

Nothing is more appealing to a capitalist than a full mall parking lot, and nothing is more crushing than an empty one.

(Sorry for the poor lighting in the photo)

Shoulders of Giants #3

“A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it. The same might be said of streets, in the sense that they serve other purposes beside carrying wheeled traffic in their middles. Streets and their sidewalks, the main public places of a city, are its most vital organs. Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city’s streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city is dull.

More than that, and here we get to the first problem, if a city’s streets are safe from barbarism and fear, the city is thereby tolerably safe from barbarism and fear. When people say that a city, or a part of it, is dangerous or a jungle what they mean primarily is that they do not feel safe on the sidewalks.”

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961