Sidewalk Ballet

Definition

The "sidewalk ballet" is Jane Jacobs's name for the intricate, improvised choreography of uses and users that constitutes a lively city street: "This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations" (Jacobs 1961, p. 50).

Jacobs narrates her own part in it on Hudson Street — the 8 a.m. garbage-can "entrance," Mr. Halpert's laundry cart, Joe Cornacchia's crates, the three parochial schools' crisscrossing children, the taxis cycling midtown–downtown, Mr. Lofaro the fruit man ("solid as earth itself") and the ten-year ritual nod that means "All is well" — through the heart-of-the-day ballet, the after-work crescendo, and the deep-night ballet of the 3 a.m. bagpipe dance (pp. 50–53). The concept is the affirmative counter-image to the planner's "wasteful streets": what looks like chaos from the planner's abstraction is "a marvelous order" whose components are specialized but "unite in their joint effect upon the sidewalk, which is not specialized in the least. That is its strength" (p. 54).

Key Thinkers

• Jane Jacobs — the concept's author and performer: the Hudson Street diary as the book's phenomenological exhibit (1961).

Related Concepts

• eyes-on-the-street — the ballet's safety-function: the same movement that choreographs the dance supplies the watching.
• public-characters — the ballet's cast: "we are the lucky possessors of a city order that makes it relatively simple to keep the peace because there are plenty of eyes on the street" (p. 54).
• everyday-life — the ballet as the everyday's urban maximal form: "something is always going on, the ballet is never at a halt, but the general effect is peaceful and the general tenor even leisurely" (p. 54).
• practiced-place — the ballet as practiced place at street scale: order produced by repetition and improvisation, not by plan.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs 1961) — the definition (p. 50); the Hudson Street day-narrative (pp. 50–53); the Joseph Guess narration of Rittenhouse Square's ballet (p. 96); the economic grounding of the ballet in mixed primary uses (p. 153); the warning against mistaking it — people who do not know such streets "will always have it a little wrong in their heads — like the old prints of rhinoceroses made from travelers' descriptions of rhinoceroses" (p. 54).

Source Support linking rule: All entries in this section must be wikilinks to source note pages in wiki/source-notes/ using the source-notes/ path prefix. Never link to raw files — raw files are not wiki pages.

This page requires fuller treatment — created at the Jacobs ingest; awaits the reception literature (Whyte's Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, Sennett) and the dance/choreography-theory readings of the figure.

Open Questions

• The ballet is Jacobs's "art form of the city" — yet Chapter 19 insists "a city cannot be a work of art" (p. 372). Is the ballet the aesthetic concept that survives that prohibition: art's form without art's control?
• Can the ballet be designed for? Its economic precondition is mixed primary uses; its choreography is unwritable. What, then, does a designer of the ballet actually do — other than supply the stage (short blocks, aged buildings, density) and refuse to run the choreography?