A Concrete Event
Lauren Phillips
August 2025
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
—Shel Siverstein [1]
Photograph of the book Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein.
There is a place where the sidewalk ends. There are many such places—though few of them resemble the threshold of possibility Shel Silverstein imagined in 1974. His sidewalk ends in wonder, in peppermint wind and chalk-white arrows leading the child out of the city and into something gentler, freer, and more true.
In most newer American cities—especially those shaped by the logic of dispersal—sidewalks end in stranger, lonelier ways. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The responsibility to care for others, philosopher Emmanuel Levinas proposes, begins not with doctrine or law, but with the face of other human beings—a presence that cannot be ignored and that demands a response [2]. In this sense, the sidewalk can become a place where the proximity of others reminds us that we share the world, and that our freedom is not solitary.
Understanding how and why sidewalks end requires attention to the larger patterns of development that shape them. The sidewalk is not merely a material feature of the city; it is a product of form, policy, and intention. Its presence—or absence—registers more than a design decision: it reflects how the city organizes movement, connection, and care.
One way to look at these broader development patterns is through the lens of inward and outward urban growth [3]. The latter—dense, connective, and oriented around regular street grids—draws movement inward, fostering proximity, encounter, and civic interaction. An example of this is New York City. The sidewalk, in this context, has the potential to become not merely an accessory to movement but a generator of productive friction—a space where competing rhythms and bodies overlap, negotiate, and adjust. It is through this low-grade resistance that civic life emerges: not from consensus, but from contact. The outward-looking city, by contrast, disperses away from the center: it branches into cul-de-sacs, arterials, and feeder roads, replacing the grid with the loop and the plaza with the parking lot. An example is Houston. Sidewalks in these environments are often poured not as connective infrastructure, but to satisfy code (or even aspirational) needs: narrow ribbons of concrete trailing past retention ponds, utility easements, and mailbox clusters, present in form but emptied of civic content.
Sidewalk Typologies
In dense cities, the sidewalk is the commons: collective ground maintained for collective use. It runs alongside buildings with stoops, shops with windows, homes with porches—spaces of invitation and address. Its care is distributed. Its value is implicit. It is not just infrastructure, but a medium of shared life.
This adjacency—the overlap between civic and domestic—forms the basis for the sidewalk’s ethical and civic potential. Here, movement generates encounters: the brush of a shoulder, a glance exchanged, the sidestep that accommodates a stroller or a dog. These are small moments of friction, but they are also moments of acknowledgment. They register the presence of others and, in doing so, begin to model responsibility (of the kind Levinas had hoped for).
These fleeting exchanges—mundane, unspectacular—form the microstructure of civic life. They are not grand gestures of solidarity, but habits of regard. And it is through these habits that the public realm acquires texture and meaning.
When adjacency is lost, as in dispersed cities, so is this texture. The sidewalk runs the risk of becoming a sliver of poured concrete without a trace of spatial or social attachment; one that runs beside drainage ditches, backs of fences, the buffer zones of zoning… no longer a threshold but a seam. The storefront, the stoop, the passerby—all gone. The resulting sidewalk can become a corridor of motion with no address, no friction, and no face.
Take, for example, a series of conditions typically encountered in cities with sprawl:
The Fade-Out – A soft ending in which the sidewalk gives way to grass or gravel. A passive tapering, more omission than conclusion.
The Sudden Stop – An abrupt termination at a physical barrier or property line, offering no transition or alternative route.
The Placeholder – Infrastructure installed to satisfy code but lacking context, continuity, or utility. Sidewalks in name only.
The Ghostwalk – Sidewalks devoid of human adjacency, passing the backs of lots or easements with no interface or address.
The Loop – Circuits intended for recreation rather than connection. Complete within themselves, but severed from the urban whole.
Together, these conditions describe a civic diminishment: a moment where movement fragments, where connectivity falters, and where the sidewalk ceases to function as shared ground. These terminations are not neutral—they index a larger breakdown of adjacency, responsibility, and civic form. They are not simply the end of walking routes, but of the urban ideals those routes once expressed.
The End?
Silverstein imagines a sidewalk that gives way to magic—where the "chalk-white arrows go" and "the moon-bird rests from his flight."
Whether sidewalks today end in wonder or incompletion—there remains something poignant, and even deeply human, about these paths. They are gestures (if not fully realized ones) toward the phenomenon of the body in space—to the simple but radical act of moving on foot through the built environment. They are glimpses of a civic imagination that, however threadbare, continues to negotiate the body’s terms. In their very incompleteness, they offer a space of interpretive generosity, a spatial form that, in civic absence, still allows for the possibility of movement, pause, and reflection. You can still walk them, and they are built for you—even if no one seems entirely sure who that "you" is anymore.
The sidewalk does not always lead us where we hoped—if it leads anywhere at all. But it is there, waiting for us, at the edge.
[1] Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Poems and Drawings of Shel Silverstein (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
[2] Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 194.
[3] In his theoretical work on postwar urban development, Ladders (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), Albert Pope distinguishes between centrifugal (moving away from the center) and centripetal (moving toward the center) urban forms. These are exemplified by the more traditional gridded city, oriented toward the pedestrian, and the more hierarchical systems of branching streets oriented to the automobile. I draw on Pope’s work to make this distinction.
