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The Girl Who Raised Pigeons

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In The Death and Life of American Cities, urban activist Jane Jacobs argues that cities should be designed in a way that assimilates children on the streets. Jacobs writes that city streets should serve as an “unspecialized outdoor home base” where children can “form their notions of the world” (Jacobs 81). While Jacobs believes that an urban environment is suitable for raising children, cities prove to be an unsafe and unhealthy place to grow up. Children raised in an urban environment are not properly supervised which leads them to be exposed to mature subjects prematurely. In order to experience a healthy and happy childhood, children should not be brought up in an urban environment.
Jacobs’ argument that children should make the streets …show more content…
which prove that the children given access to the city often fall victim to negative influences. In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons”, Jones describes the upbringing of a young girl, Betsy Ann, to a single father in an urban community. One day, unsupervised Betsy Ann is influenced by her friend Darlene Greenley to “go far away to 7th and Massachusetts and steal candy bars from Peoples Drug” (18). The fact Betsy Ann would do something so unethical “while [her father] was out doing the best he could” pained her father, Robert Morgan (18). Because Betsy Ann has access to a vast array of streets and stores in the city, she has more opportunities to make poor decisions. Due to the lack of supervision she receives on the city streets, Betsy Ann is easily influenced by one of her friends to partake in a criminal activity. The combination of improper supervision and exposure to negative influences often lead city children like Betsy Ann to make poor …show more content…
In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta describes dropping his son off at an urban school located in Bombay, a city with a population density ranging from 17,550 to 1 million people per square mile (Mehta 10). Mehta writes, “I can’t recognize my son. I can’t pick him out from the whole crowd of brown-skinned kids in white uniforms. For the first time in his life, he’s just like the others” (33). As Mehta watches from afar, he cannot distinguish his son own son from the other children. If Mehta cannot pick out his son from the crowd, how is it possible that a school teacher could properly supervise his or her students? Just like encountering strangers on city streets, attending overpopulated urban schools increases the likelihood that unsupervised children fall victim to negative influence . Unlike his friends back in Bombay, Mehta did not attend high school in the extremely dense city. Thus, when he returns for a visit at age seventeen he notes that “the city and [his] friends in it had grown wild and strange ways” (10). For instance, his friends all smoked cigarettes and drank heavily whereas Mehta did not. Participating in these adult activities in high school are conceivably a result of attending an overpopulated urban high school where there was a lack of true supervision. Children that are raised in a city generally are

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