inter alia, housing, mortgage financing, urban renewal, and zoning decisions. "This is the most amazing event in the whole sorry tale: that finally people who sincerely wanted to strengthen great cities should adopt recipes frankly devised for undermining their economies and killing them." She is less sympathetic toward Le Corbusier, noting with dismay that the dream city, however impractical and detached from the actual context of existing cities, "was hailed deliriously by architects, and has gradually been embodied in scores of projects, ranging from low-income public housing to office building projects." She expresses further concern that, in seeking to avoid becoming contaminated by "the workaday city," isolated City Beautiful efforts dismally failed to attract visitors, were prone to unsavory loitering and dispirited decay, and ironically hastened the pace of urban demise. The significance of sidewalks Jacobs frames the sidewalk as a central mechanism in maintaining the order of the city. "This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance." To Jacobs, the sidewalk is the quotidian stage for an "intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole." Jacobs posits cities as fundamentally different from towns and suburbs principally because they are full of strangers. More precisely, the ratio of strangers to acquaintances is necessarily lopsided everywhere one goes in the city, even outside their doorstep, "because of the sheer number of people in small geographical compass." A central challenge of the city, therefore, is to make its inhabitants feel safe, secure, and socially integrated in the midst of an overwhelming volume of rotating strangers. The healthy sidewalk is a critical mechanism for achieving these ends, given its role in preventing crime and facilitating contact with others. Jacobs emphasizes that city sidewalks should be considered in combination with physical environment surrounding sidewalks. As she put it, "A city sidewalk by itself is nothing. It is an abstraction. It means something only in conjunction with the buildings and other uses that border it, or border other sidewalks very near it." Safety Jacobs argues that city sidewalks and people who use sidewalks actively participate in fighting against disorder and preserving civilization. They are more than "passive beneficiaries of safety or helpless victims of danger".