I went for a walk yesterday to check out the surroundings of the new neighborhood being built. It’s located on the southwestern part of the island. North of the site there’s a park, or something, that’s a good example of a dead place.

Dead places can be found here and there in every city, and what defines them is that the places lack elements that add life. They are places you’d hesitate to visit at night, for instance. They emit negative energy.

This dead place has potential: it’s near the water, there’s trees and lawns, and so forth. What has made it a dead place is the fact that it’s partly under a big bridge, and it looks as if people has made a habit of driving out there to dump old furniture and other kinds of garbage they don’t know what to do with.

What’s interesting is that immediately on the other side of the bridge, there new neighborhood is being built. And it will be linked with this dead place so people easily can walk along the shoreline around the entire island.

East of the site there’s an old park, which is not quite a dead place yet, but needs a makeover. However, this is something that’s scheduled to begin next year, probably due to pressures from the building companies.

Jane Jacobs wrote that a steady succession of eyes keeps the sidewalk safe. Dead places doesn’t get enough visitors to add life to them. They are abandoned.

The interesting thing is that places can be dead and abandoned even if people do visit them frequently. In addition to visiting, people must also care about the places.

A while back I read about some plans for a dead place right in the center of Stockholm. The authorities were thinking of building a skyscraper or at least a tall building, with the intention to add life (although they didn’t call it that).

In the guidelines for the competition to which architects could submit their proposals the authorities said that a hotel would be good, or a newspaper or television office where people would work 24 hours a day. The thing is that people staying at a hotel doesn’t care about the neighborhood. They don’t stay long enough to develop feelings deep enough to bother about the well-being of the neighborhood.

Also, a place must be pleasing, likable, for people to care about it. This is the broken windows theory. If a place communicates that nobody cares about it, nobody will begin to care about it either. If people see evidence of other people acting carelessly, they will act carelessly as well.

So, the dead place at north of the building site has a chance of becoming a living place, because people will inevitably keep walking past the new neighborhood along the water once they can, but it will have a bigger chance if it’s renovated.