Ivan Illich, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Kenneth Jackson, Marshall Berman and others have written critically of the ways neighborhoods are restructured to accommodate expressways, eliminating corner grocery stores, neighborhood taverns, green spaces, and other amenities which form the backbone of everyday life. Far from acting as a general tool for freedom, automobiles disenfranchise relatively large segments of the middle class, the young, the elderly and the rural from full participation in public life. In her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities , Jane Jacobs offers several chapters of keen observations on the uses of sidewalks. Sidewalks require no expensive vehicles, and a momentary lapse of attention is unlikely to lead to fatality. Functionally designed, sidewalks promote public safety, easy sociability, and the assimilation of children into adult life.
Sidewalks are social spaces which create neighborhood characters and distinctive personalities.
Information highway proponents play a variation of the old shell game. Advocates of these new technologies, especially the heads of large media conglomerates and the research communities that are poised to reap substantial material benefits, describe a bright and shiny future, a vision glimmering with rich democratic possibilities. Social spaces on the information superhighway will be expensive. We may, if we desire, choose an alternative technological route, but given the present political climate, these initiatives will have the limited effectiveness of the two a.m. public service announcement. It is dangerous when the ground for social interaction is designed by, and has its roots in, a subset of individuals who disdain social interaction.