Multifunction City Road and Life Public Space

Jacobs said “Think of a city and what comes to mind? It is the streets. If a city’s street looks interesting the city looks interesting, if they look dull the city looks dull(Jacobs, 1961)” in his famous book which has title “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” and he tries to remind us about how important urban city planning. When we think about a city concept, the first thing which crosses in our mind is the streets. If the street from a city has interesting appearance and attractive architecture, the city will look more beautiful but when the city streets were deserted, dead, and even scary, so the city will become boring and uninteresting to visit. Life and function of the city road become one of determining the attractiveness of a city.

According to Ellis (1986), the road can be divided spatially into two elements, street space or road space and the street wall or road boundary. Road space can be defined as the city spaces which bounded by the walls of the city buildings and city landscape.

Basically, city road is one among several physical elements of the earliest manifestation in the city concept of city embryo. City roads usually use to connect one place to another and eventually into the movement path or movement channels of city network to the people and transporting equipment or vehicles.

Today’s development, road function has widened category function and now we are recognizes it like road space with a variety functions. In every city around the world, city road used to identify the street as a public area for transact business transaction. Even in many places such as in Chinatown, Singapore, corridors road space in shophouses that lined depart it became the major attraction for tourists who come to this conservation area. That is where the public sale and purchase transactions in the street spaces.

City road space is the arena for social interaction, when road space is interesting to visit, the public will flock to be able to use each other to see and be seen. In this function, as well as road space also functions as a communication space. The availability of street furniture and public amenities is very important in relation to this function.

Furthermore, on city road space also can be functionally to serves local lecture representation. We have often witnessed the activities of the culture based on city streets. Communal rituals and cultural parades usually are display on city streets. Long corridor of the city hall stage will be transformed into a vibrant city and is fully belong to the public. While at the other times city road space will also become the setting for the procession of death as well as a parade of marriage, two different atmosphere that appears to be an urban space, namely road space.

Even for some communities, road space is the arena to realize their creativity. Street musicians express their self by action in city road space as well as, social protest and demonstrations conducted also usually doing at this area. For this latter function, road space to be one arena expresses their political

Multifunction City Road and Life Public Space Galleries