Looking through the history of skyway made me reflect that such a common thing in our daily life is an avant-garde pedestrian system in the 1960s. I understand it as “socially produced and produces the social” based on Ackbar Abbas’s (2010) summary of the space.
The skyway was designed to fulfill different kinds of urban city needs. From the view of city planning, this vehicle-free zone can help manage traffic while the interior connection makes people comfortable and safe. Commercially, the convenient access to multi public spaces (e.g., transit stations, shopping malls, leisure places, real estate) helps downtown economics under the pressure of the growth of suburb’s economics. In the meantime, this alternation of the spatial logic form also makes the city. This physical delamination made a class division from people who lived in the interior spaces, say the official workers, out of the street, where the poor, homeless people lived.
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It is excellent that you access Yoos and Jams’ piece by tracking back to Abbas’s text. Understanding skyway in terms of the traffic system, commerce and social hierarchy does promote us to understand “socially produced and produces the social”. Please take a further reflection on how skyway, as the social production, is shaped by different social circumstances and in turn subvert the pre-existing social and spatial order.