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Chapter 5 traces the tactics of anti-abortion activists and their impact on the experience of abortion providers and patients. Already in the 1970s, towns tried to prevent the opening of abortion clinics through building and zoning regulations. Once clinics had opened, demonstrators in front of abortion clinics, intimidated patients and abortion providers, held prayer vigils and harassed patients and staff through sidewalk counselling. The chapter discusses the history and tactics of sidewalk counselling and Crisis Pregnancy Centers and the attempts of abortion providers to defend themselves against anti-abortion activism. Providers’ ability to endure the harassment and continue their work depended in part on their ability to get help from law enforcement. And African American patients and providers also relied on their experiences as civil rights activists when confronting anti-abortion activists. The chapter focuses on the experiences of clinics in Fort Wayne, Indiana and Fargo, North Dakota, and concludes with a discussion of Operation Rescue tactics in Atlanta and Detroit.

Chapter 5 documents efforts by United Center ownership to purge nearby sidewalks of independent peanut vendors who competed for local concessions revenues. The first iteration of these efforts involved the imposition of a blanket ban on bringing food purchased outside the arena inside (fans had long brought peanuts into the old Chicago Stadium). The vendors responded by filing an antitrust suit against stadium ownership. The vendors' arguments were solidly grounded in case law from the post-WWII period; but arena ownership prevailed in large part as a result of the expansion after the 1970s of a judicial logic which prioritized the rights of big business to maximize profits free of government regulation, regardless of the business practices involved. The second iteration was the use of campaign contributions and other lobbying by Reinsdorf and his partners to convince the Chicago City Council to pass an ordinance banning any street vending within 1,000 feet of the arena (the council passed the ordinance before final resolution of the antitrust suit). Ironically, the ordinance marshaled the power of local government to protect the concessions monopoly of the United Center while the arena owners' lawyers advocated for the virtues of "free markets" in federal court.

This chapter focuses on both the resilience and evolution of the spatial practices of everyday people on the sidewalks through Ho Chi Minh City’s history. With an emphasis on spatial practices, the chapter selects two very different urban morphologies within present day Ho Chi Minh City, the French colonial center, which built a mini-Paris in Asia, and the merchant Chinatown of Cholon. While morphology has been viewed as both an expression of and shaper of culture and socio- economic structure, this chapter pursues a more nuanced tracing of how ordinary people have throughout history have altered, continued, subverted the use of interstitial public spaces in the city through various regimes: early settlement years, French colonial urbanism, communist revolutionary years, and the current market transition period. Recovering the history of practice allows a deeper reflection on the space and society nexus and how we define cultural urban identities such as the “Vietnamese city” or “Asian city.”

This chapter introduces Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s sidewalk life as an exemplar case in the midst of the current global foment where governments and people are searching for new ways to use and govern this important public space. This chapter outlines fundamental epistemological problems that have been hindering our exploration of this terrain of opportunity and conflict: old boundaries between social science, physical space, and urban design disciplines and conceptual dichotomies such as public/private and formal/informal fail to address the conditions of rapid immigration and urbanization while often introducing perilous urban planning interventions. The basis for the rest of the book, the chapter overviews an alternative theoretical framework for understanding public space that integrates both its physicality and social structure: a) a spatialized ethnography is needed to uncover overlooked urban populations and actual, situated spatial practices rather than assumed ones, b) a rehabilitated property rights theory which views public space in terms of socially negotiated and enforced entitlements and liabilities between property owners, police, street vendors, and the general public and c) a critical cartography that maps new knowledge about urban space.

This chapter presents the core quest of the book: creating a new kind of map that will unveil rather than obscure sidewalk life. The motivation for mapping was to create an alternative set of facts that could help inform the controversies over street vending and the ideal sidewalk. It explains the spatial ethnography fieldwork methods developed that integrate detailed field surveys of space use, hundreds of interviews, the coding of data into GIS, and different sources of visual representation such as photography and difficult to obtain historical, state planning, and private developer maps. The chapter then presents a critical cartography primer that visually discusses through a progression of original maps how cartographic choices and logics veil and unveil phenomenon and knowledge. Seeking alternatives to Euclidean conventions, the maps show phenomena such as sidewalks as social constructs, as space that evolves over the hours of the day and years, the enforcement of micro-properties, and the experiential qualities of HCMC’s sidewalk life. The chapter concludes with the proposition of a mixed-use sidewalk: sidewalk space can be transacted between multiple types of users over the course of the day, expanding the possibilities of public space.

This chapter moves from maps as vehicles of critical analysis to platforms for imagining and discussing new spatial practice. Theories of social cognition offer that institutional change is created through new paradigms becoming normalized through a society-wide process of spreading ideas by seeing the practices of exemplars and those within our social networks. This chapter explores the possibility of using the map as a medium of such social paradigm change. The chapter presents the case of an original proposal that was developed and presented by invitation to the Ho Chi Minh City planning department for a tourist pedestrian path that would incorporate sidewalk vending into the experience. While international tourism has been one of the rationales for sidewalk clearance policies, this chapter shows how visual strategies of data and argumentation were used to engage a surprisingly enthusiastic reception by HCMC’s urban planning, transportation, and tourism bureaus to an alternative paradigm where sidewalk life is conceptualized as an asset to manage rather than as a problem to clear.

Air, water, and food environments profoundly influence health. Yet, many humans spend most of their time in “built environments”: the structures and places designed and built to surround human existence. These environments range from homes, schools, offices, industrial facilities, roadways, sidewalks, parks, and even vehicles. All of these environments can raise or limit risks to injuries; acute illnesses, such as asthma; and long- term disorders, such as obesity and diabetes. These environments shape economic, social, and psychological well-being—and ultimately planetary sustainability. Designing environments to promote physical activity, including walking, stair climbing, bicycling and other forms of active transportation, is a documented tool for public health improvement.

This chapter examines how the South Street Seaport bridged New York City's past and present through its historic preservation initiatives. It begins by focusing on Peter M. Stanford's efforts to revive the city of New York and preserve the Seaport neighborhood before discussing the South Street Seaport Museum's vision to make the district a collection of small museums that would restore endangered buildings. It then considers the Seaport's Sidewalk History Project that introduced pedestrians to everything from “Waterfront Dives” to “Warehouse Cats.” It also explores the Seaport's designation as a centerpiece of the Bicentennial celebration in New York City, during which tourists roamed the “museum without walls.” Finally, it describes attempts to save Kaiulani, a square-rigger stranded on a Filipino beach, and the significance of Operation Sail 1976 to New York's Bicentennial.

Some problems that block clubs confronted were too complex for low-budget, volunteer organizations to tackle on their own. To address issues such as deteriorating sidewalks, garbage collection, and abandoned buildings, concerned residents had to appeal for government attention. City and private clean-up campaigns encouraged block club members to remove garbage from their surroundings and coordinated its removal. An important function of block clubs was to attract government services to solve local problems. For example, block club members learned how to petition the city government to send building inspectors into their neighborhoods to enforce the housing code; members then followed the cases of cited properties through the court system. In addition, umbrella organizations sometimes used their constituent block clubs to argue that they merited expensive large-scale redevelopment projects such as urban renewal.

This chapter addresses two basic, yet fundamental questions: how does the study of space inform us about the nature of walking in Rome and how does movement through a space allow us to understand the construction, purpose, and meaning of that space? It proposes a new approach to the study of movement in the city of Rome by establishing an ‘archaeology of walking’, utilizing archaeological evidence and the Forma Urbis Romae (FUR) alongside the ancient texts, to identify different experiences of walking in the city of Rome and the nature as well as the atmosphere of Rome's streets, sidewalks, and portico complexes.

The subject of Chapter 3 is the six-century-long evolution of Pompeian street surfaces and the architectures that accompany them. These surfaces include streets made of beaten ash that once covered the entire city, the cobblestone surfaces found only at the gates, and the famous irregular blocks of lava used to pave Roman roads and streets alike. Uncommon surfaces and repair techniques, such as streets built atop piles of earthquake debris or the pouring of iron slag into deep ruts, are also discussed. Just as important to understanding this evolution as their functional characteristics, however, are the social forces that drove their adoption and their replacement.

The second part of the book examines the city from its street-level intimations, considering the architectural history and cultural significance of iconic avenues like Broadway and the Bowery as well as spaces of public intersection like the slum and the subway. From the emergence of the Manhattan grid and the modernist phenomenon of grid art to the nocturnal streetwalkers of Nella Larsen’s Harlem and Stephen Crane’s Lower East Side, and from the sidewalk recordings of early cinema to the mean streets of Jacob Riis’s slum photography and the isolated passengers of Mark Rothko’s subway abstractions, Part II explores the diverse cultural manifestations and spatial reconfigurations of the modern sidewalk and its conditions of speed, movement, and dislocation. Part II argues that both the modern sidewalk itself (as an urban form) and the experiences it generates (as a public space) are anything but marginal or subsidiary. Rather, as demonstrated in relation to a rich variety of examples, the modern sidewalk emerges—and endures—as an active site of contestation and experiment.