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Making a Living in Jane Jacobs’s Sidewalk
Sidewalk provides opportunities for those on the edge to engage in self-directed entrepreneurial activity.
Mitchell Duneier, 1999. Sidewalk, with photographs by Ovie Carter and an afterword by Hakim Hasan. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Manning, Philip. 2001. "Sidewalk." Symbolic Interaction 24(1):113-116.
Hopper, Kim. 2001. review of Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier, Social Service Review, 75(1):173-177.
Recently the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang spoke of empowering the street vendors to promote the “Stall Economy”, focusing on the low-income people in China, which sparked hot trending in the social media. Speaking of sidewalk, we should revisit the classic articulation by Jane Jacobs in her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities published in 1961. This is also the departing point of Sidewalk by Mitchell Duneier, an American sociologist.First, Sidewalk is set scarcely a dozen blocks from where Jane Jacobs lived when she was writing The Death and Life of Great American Cities. It is Mitch Duneier's tribute and successor to that classic work. Second, Greenwich Village looked very different forty years ago, when Jane Jacobs was writing her classic book. Much of the architecture remains, and many people still live the way Jacobs's descriptions suggest; but there is another, more marginal population on these streets: poor black men who make their lives on the Village sidewalks. In Sidewalk, Duneier sets out to look at the lives of the poor (mainly) black men who work and/or live on the sidewalks of an upper-middle-class neighborhood.Specifically, he asks: how do these persons live in a moral order? How do they have the ingenuity to do so in the face of exclusion and stigmatization on the basis of race and class? How does the way they do so affront the sensibilities of the working and middle classes? How do their acts intersect with a city's mechanisms to regulate its public spaces?
In Sidewalk Duneier describes the social world of the men and women who work and sometimes live on Sixth Avenue in New York. Duneier's narrative is character driven: he names, presents photographs, and introduces us to many of the people he met through his research, telling us their stories. The book feels very concrete. It explains the norms of street life through descriptions of people living that life. As a result, Duneier succeeds in one of his goals: to humanize a marginalized group that in different ways, at different times, and by different groups has been either ignored or legally sanctioned.It is a generous book, wearing its sympathy for its characters with refreshing ease. It is also an unsparing and disciplined piece of scholarship that not only contextualizes the lifeways of this block but also goes to great lengths to track down the claims of informants whose credibility may be suspect in the reader's eyes one man's childhood memory of lynchings in South Carolina, Hakim's corporate past, Mudrick's much-professed devotion to his granddaughter.The people whose lives are chronicled by Duneier are present and accountable in multiple ways. They are called by their real names; their talk is transcribed very accurately, and they are portrayed in some remarkable photographs by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Ovie Carter.Sidewalk revitalizes the tradition of Chicago school of urban sociologyDuneier’s appreciation of the value of personal documents and life histories is reminiscent of W. I. Thomas; his relationship with Hakim has echoes of Sutherland and Conwell. In this regard, it is striking that Duneier invited Hakim to the University of California, Santa Barbara, to team teach a sociology course, just as Sutherland had invited Chic Conwell to Indiana University many years before.Duneier attributes his sense of ethnography to his former teacher, Howard Becker, and also to Elliot Liebow and Elijah Anderson. However, Goffman seems an especially pertinent model here. Just as in Asylums (1961), Goffman was in effect an advocate for the institutionalized mentally ill, so in Sidewalk Duneier is an advocate for those who live and work on Sixth Avenue. But while Goffman gave voice to the life of those he studied, Duneier gives them a face. This is an important difference: Goffman primarily wanted to develop a theoretical understanding of the difficult, sometimes tragic, circumstances of the patients at St. Elizabeth's mental hospital. Duneier wants to present a more personalized narrative of the difficult, sometimes tragic, lives of the people he came to know. In this sense, perhaps Duneier is more like Sue Estroff, whose Making It Crazy (1981) described psychopharmacological life outside a mental hospital in a much more personalized way than Goffman had described an earlier time in one.Sidewalk is an important book because it grants us access to the social world of Sixth Avenue. In so doing, Duneier reaffirms the value and tradition of Chicago school symbolic interactionism. However, he has also extended this tradition by integrating new approaches and insights, particularly from feminist theory and conversation analysis.The key informant who has changed the writing of the researcherDuneier's gatekeeper is a bookseller on Sixth Avenue, Hakim Hasan, whom he met by chance in 1992. To his surprise, Duneier found his first book(Slim’s Table) on sale at the book stand of Hakim.Duneier approached Hakim Hasan, a man who sold "black books" from a table on Sixth Avenue, to ask him how he understood his role on the street. "I'm a public character," Hasan responded. "A what?" Duneier asked. "Have you ever read Jane Jacobs' 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities'?" Hasan answered. "You'll find it in there."Hakim's insight would figure in a central way in the manner in which Duneier would come to see the sidewalk life of this neighborhood. When Duneier got home, he looked it up:“The social structure of sidewalk life hangs partly on what can be called self-appointed public characters. A public character is anyone who is in frequent contact with a wide circle of people and who is sufficiently interested to make himself a public character. A public character need have no special talents or wisdom to fulfill his functional though he often does. He just needs to be present, and there need to be enough of his counterparts. His main qualification is that he is public, that he talks to lots of different people. In this way, news travels that is of sidewalk interest.”Duneier came to see Hakim as a person of some consequence out on the street, not merely a public character but a street intellectual of sorts as well. As a vendor of black books, he decided, he would have work that was meaningful-that sustained him economically and intellectually.Duneier realizes that on these sidewalks, the vendors, scavengers, and panhandlers have developed economic roles, complex work, and mentors who have given them encouragement to try to live "better" lives. This is the story of the largely invisible social structure of the sidewalk.The role of the public character need not be filled by conventionally respectable people. Not only do the vendors and scavengers, often unhoused, abide by codes and norms; but mostly their presence on the street enhances the social order. They keep their eyes upon the street, and the structure of sidewalk life encourages them to support one another.Through Hakim, Duneier learned to see Sixth Avenue as an internally regulated world, with a status hierarchy of booksellers, recycled magazine sellers, panhandlers, and related groups who help with these street activities. Based on seven years of field observations and bolstered by a collection of twenty life histories, Duneier introduces us to their stories, attitudes, aspirations, and rationalizations. In the Appendix Duneier reveals that the first draft of Sidewalk had focused less on these disparate stories and more on Hakim himself but that Hakim had counseled him against this. Despite having the manuscript ready and accepted for publication, Duneier took Hakim's advice to heart and made further observations that led to the published version of the project.Sidewalk as a place to make a livelihoodHere on the sidewalk, men are able to engage in legal entrepreneurial activity that helps them maintain respect for others and for themselves. Although the act of picking through recycled trash and setting up tables on the street appears to create disorder, which might lead to crime, I have rarely seen any crime spring from this environment.The correct response is not for the society to attempt to rid public space of the outcasts it has had a hand in producing. It is vital to the well-being of cities with extreme poverty that there be opportunities for those on the edge to engage in self-directed entrepreneurial activity.
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