While we stare down at our mapping apps or outsource our navigation to the nearest Uber to speed down city streets, architects, city officials, urban planners and design firms, among others, are paying increasing attention to the ways in which urban design speaks to urban inhabitants. The American urbanist William H Whyte (1917-1999), who wrote the seminal texts The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces (1980) and City: Rediscovering the Center (1988), set the stage for much of the data collecting and spatial observation now being conducted in cities. His groundbreaking work continues to have a huge influence on those, such as the aforementioned Gehl and the American urban planner Allan Jacobs, who are devoted to improving our experience of space and place. The question facing people invested in the life of cities is one of motivation – how, other than through explicit signage, penalties and prohibitions, can they influence the way we move through the city’s public spaces? More specifically, they study how the built environment can be designed so that people are ‘nudged’ to act in ways that are safe, sustainable and socially desirable. Small-scale interventions – chairs that can be moved, water features that add soothing sounds and visuals, the inclusion of ledges and edges on which to perch – have all been found to make spaces more inviting. Good lighting, the exclusion of bushes that might create hidden areas for illegal activity and safe bike paths for those without cars all make an area safer.

Pending future publication of my more extensive account of this in the journal Urban History, one early example must suffice here. Beginning in 1914, New York City designated some streets as “play streets,” where children could roam freely. These were cordoned off to motor traffic, but trucks were permitted in to make local deliveries. On Valentine’s Day in 1949, a truck driver drove his coal truck into a play street in East Harlem to make an early afternoon delivery. He had beaten a charge of vehicular homicide 14 years earlier. According to accounts by the New York Daily News and the Chicago Tribune, two 10-year-old girls, Carmelita Rodriguez and Maria Rodriguez (unrelated), on their lunch hour from Public School 121, strode out of a store with the candy they just purchased, confident in the safety of the play street. The truck driver struck them with his vehicle, killing both girls. Maria’s nine-year-old sister witnessed the girls’ deaths. {"contentId":"Q9RXWHT1UM0W01","position":"in-article2","dimensions":{"mobile":[[5,19],[300,250],[3,3],[1,1],"fluid"]},"type":"In Article Flex Native Ad","positionIncrement":1,"targeting":{"position":"in-article2","positionIncrement":1,"url":"/news/articles/2019-10-08/the-hidden-history-of-american-anti-car-protests"},"containerId":"in-article-2-Q9RXWHT1UM0W01"} The next day, local residents formed a “parent and baby-carriage blockade,” stopping and turning back all delivery vehicles. According to a New York Daily News reporter, 100 women participated; photos of the protest show an ethnically diverse population. Mary di Stefano, president of the Parents’ Association of P.S. 121, made their position clear: “They’ll have to kill us to get through here, ” she told the Daily News. The next day, parents set up a second picket one block north.The demonstrators extracted a concession: The city would close the play street to delivery vehicles on weekdays during the hours when children were walking to and from school, including the lunch hour.