Incomplete Streets

Processes, practices, and possibilities

Stephen Zavestoski, Julian Agyeman, Stephen Zavestoski, Julian Agyeman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317930976
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Development Economics
• Index: Economics

The 'Complete Streets' concept and movement in urban planning and policy has been hailed by many as a revolution that aims to challenge the auto-normative paradigm by reversing the broader effects of an urban form shaped by the logic of keeping automobiles moving. By enabling safe access for all users, Complete Streets promise to make cities more walkable and livable and at the same time more sustainable.

This book problematizes the Complete Streets concept by suggesting that streets should not be thought of as merely physical spaces, but as symbolic and social spaces. When important social and symbolic narratives are missing from the discourse and practice of Complete Streets, what actually results are incomplete streets. The volume questions whether the ways in which complete streets narratives, policies, plans and efforts are envisioned and implemented might be systematically reproducing many of the urban spatial and social inequalities and injustices that have characterized cities for the last century or more. From critiques of a "mobility bias" rooted in the neoliberal foundations of the Complete Streets concept, to concerns about resulting environmental gentrification, the chapters in Incomplete Streets variously call for planning processes that give voice to the historically marginalized and, more broadly, that approach streets as dynamic, fluid and public social places.

This interdisciplinary book is aimed at students, researchers and professionals in the fields of urban geography, environmental studies, urban planning and policy, transportation planning, and urban sociology.

1

COMPLETE STREETS

What’s missing?

Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman

Cities in the United States have suffered from 80 years of development shaped by an undying commitment to the automobile as the primary mode of transit. This commitment has left a physical legacy of air pollution and associated health risks and impacts, poor public transit options and unsafe conditions for pedestrians and bicyclists in both old metropolitan areas (e.g., New York, Chicago, Atlanta, and Detroit) and newer urban centers (e.g., Denver, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Las Vegas). In each of these cities, and in many other smaller cities, low income and minority communities have borne the worst effects of auto-centric development. Not only have these communities been disproportionately utilized as the locus of industrial and other unwanted development, they have also been used as transportation corridors facilitating the speedy movement of people and goods through (or often over) their neighborhoods. This benefitted the suburban dweller and downtown employer, but not the highway-dissected community.

Recent trends in urban planning and policy aim to challenge this auto-normative paradigm by reversing the broader effects of an urban form shaped by the logics of keeping automobiles moving. The aim of creating “Complete Streets” in “walkable” and “livable cities” is an example of such an effort. Transportation Alternatives Magazine (2007) boldly asserts: “The Complete Streets revolution has begun.” Everyone, it seems, from planners to public health professionals to politicians wants them. According to Mobility Magazine: “North America is on the verge of a new paradigm … At the forefront of the ‘street revolution’ is the concept of Complete Streets” (Whitney 2010).

The New York Chapter of the American Association of Family Physicians has proclaimed the health benefits of Complete Streets:

The pedestrian plazas, car-free spaces, neighborhood bike networks and world-class bicycle lanes … [of New York City] are vital to the public health of our city. These changes help pave the way for a city that breathes cleaner air and is in better physical condition.

(Murphy 2011)

Elsewhere, Complete Streets are seen as a strategy to fight childhood obesity. “The road was very clear,” a report of the Michigan Department of Community Health tells us, discussing an initiative sponsored by the Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. The report continues:

In 2009. as the state with the 9th highest rate of obesity, Michigan had much work to do … [T]he Michigan Department of Community Health created a five-year strategic plan to reduce childhood obesity in Michigan. One of its first initiatives? A statewide effort to address Complete Streets.

(Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2011)

Complete Streets policies are even seen as a tool for diversity, as Annise Parker, Mayor of Houston, Texas, explains about the city’s new policy:

Houston is a city that embraces its diversity. This Complete Streets policy applies the same approach to our mobility system by meeting the diverse needs of all Houstonians while also creating more accessible and attractive connections to residential areas, parks, businesses, restaurants, schools and employment centers.

(City of Houston, Mayor’s Office 2013)

Perhaps the greatest evidence of the “revolution,” at least in the US context, is the proliferation of policies and laws institutionalizing and codifying Complete Streets as a guiding principle in urban planning. “Communities of all sizes are transforming their streets into more than just a way to move people in cars from one place to another,” reports the National Complete Streets Coalition. “These communities are part of a growing national movement for Complete Streets.” In fact, the National Complete Streets Coalition’s 2013 report on best Complete Streets policies of 2012 claims that there are now 488 Complete Streets policies across the US. These exist at all levels of government, including 27 statewide policies. More than 25 percent of the existing policies were passed in 2012 alone (National Complete Streets Coalition 2013).

If there is indeed a Complete Streets revolution, then the objective must be to challenge the paradigm that produces in-Complete Streets. So, what exactly do we mean in calling this book Incomplete Streets?

Complete Streets

First introduced to the lexicon in 2003 by Barbara McCann, a staff member of the advocacy organization America Bikes, Complete Streets was proposed as an alternative to the term “routine accommodation,” which was being used to convey the need to include bicycles in transportation planning. As McCann recounts, “Right away, we knew that we had a concept that was bigger than bicycles” (McCann 2010). The coalition model that McCann developed between America Bikes and the League of American Bicyclists quickly expanded to include AARP, the American Planning Association, the American Public Transportation Association, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the American Heart Association. Advocates and transportation planners were brought together and eventually developed the following definition of a Complete Streets policy:

A Complete Streets policy ensures that the entire right of way is routinely designed and operated to enable safe access for all users. Pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities must be able to safely move along and across a complete street.

(McCann and Rynne 2010, p. 3)

The concept began garnering national and international media attention from outlets such as The New York Times (Kral 2008), USA Today (Ritter 2007) and Time Magazine (Padgett 2009), and from organizations like Streetsblog, Transportation Alternatives, 8–80 Cities, and the National Complete Streets Coalition in North America, as well as organizations such as Living Streets in the UK, the Bicycling Empowerment Network in South Africa, and international organizations like Walk21 and Embarq.

While Complete Streets is the zeitgeist in the US, it is rhetorically linked to concepts commonly used outside the US such as “Livable Cities” and “Cities for People.” These concepts and their associated discourses have exploded in urban planning, transportation planning, environmental policy and sustainable communities circles. Developing as part of and related to the urban planning über-narrative of “place-making,” the movement has transformed the frames of livable, walkable streets into a mobilizing frame that has led to coalition building and activism, influenced legislation and policy, and provided the average citizen with a compelling and tangible vision of the potential of their streets beyond that of mere automobile conduit. Indeed, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) notes that the purpose of street design is to ensure “operational efficiency, comfort, safety, and convenience for the motorist.”

For the National Complete Streets Coalition in the US, the movement is about changing the AASHTO transportation paradigm from “moving cars quickly” to “providing safe access for all modes,” including pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and transit riders of all ages and abilities. The Coalition adds that the Complete Streets movement “encourages and provides for safe access to destinations for everyone, regardless of age, ability, income, ethnicity, or mode of travel.” The extent to which the Complete Streets discourse has been adopted by professional planning and transportation associations, the way it gives shape to the efforts of walking and bicycling advocacy organizations, and the inspiration it provides for ordinary citizens aiming to make their communities more livable, is remarkable.

Implicit in the Complete Streets concept is the notion that streets are not currently designed to meet the needs of all users. It conveys the message that streets are ultimately public spaces, and that everyone in the community—from pedestrians to bicyclists to public transit users—should have equal rights to space within them, irrespective of whether they are driving a car or not. As Agyeman (2013) notes: “[This] street-level spatial justice, this ‘democratization of the street’ through the redistribution of rights to (and in) public space, may make the street look physically different, but I think it also fundamentally rewires our brains, affecting the way we think.” In this way, adding these “other” street users effectively de-centers the motorist and problematizes the auto-normative paradigm while potentially bringing together previously disconnected interest groups— people with disabilities, bicyclists, senior citizens, public transit advocates and others—into a powerful coalition. Streets, the movement implies, are incomplete when they are designed, constructed and maintained with the primary objective of moving automobiles efficiently.

Incomplete streets

While we certainly agree with its challenge to auto-normativity, the aim of this book is to problematize the Complete Streets concept in ways that might provoke its more critical use and application by urban planners, policy-makers, and academics. We have asked the authors in this volume to investigate the question: “Complete for whom?” If the movement claims that Complete Streets policies, when implemented, “complete” previously incomplete streets, then we ought to ask whether all street users are, in fact, gaining safe access to streets “regardless of age, ability, income, ethnicity, or mode of travel” (National Complete Streets Coalition). The accepted definition of Complete Streets, while recognizing “diversity,” refers to “users” of streets. This effectively reduces people primarily to their mode of transportation. Yet not everyone’s mode of transportation is a choice. Some people choose to cycle while others are forced to. What mistakes might we be making in assuming that redesigning streets with the goal of providing safe access to all users of streets can sufficiently address the broader historical, political, social, and economic forces shaping the socioeconomic and racial inequalities embedded in and reproduced by the spaces we call streets?

Like Massey (1995), we see places (and streets are places) as having no fixed meaning; rather, they are “constantly shifting articulations of social relations through time.” Yet much of the current physically-focused Complete Streets rhetoric disconnects streets from their significant social, structural, symbolic, discursive, and historical realities. Economically, ethnically, and racially diverse members of communities are referred to monolithically as “users.” Assumptions are made that “users” make rational choices about different “modes” of transportation available to get themselves from point A to point B. This book calls for a (re)conceptualization of Complete Streets that humanizes “users” by acknowledging their difference and diversity and by asking questions about how individuals’ experiences as historically marginalized members of society (and users of streets), among other identities, impinge on their ability to participate in dialogues about Complete Streets, and whether their lack of voice in turn gives shape to urban spaces that subtly, and not so subtly, exclude certain individuals.

In the wake of the rapid and largely unproblematized rise of the Complete Streets movement (see for example Schlossberg et al. 2013; McCann 2013), the types of questions asked in the chapters of this book are vital if the movement is to fully deliver on its promises. We draw our critical, theoretical and intellectual inspiration from the works of, among others, Henri Lefebvre (1974) and Ed Soja (2010) on the trialectics of space, and on spatial justice; from Henri Lefebvre (1974), David Harvey (2008) and Don Mitchell (2003) on the right to the city; from Julian Agyeman (2013) on “just sustainabilities”; and from Doreen Massey (1995) and Talja Blokland (2009) on social relations and historical narratives regarding place. Yet few urban planners are asking the types of questions we explore here. Academics, especially in fields such as urban geography, planning and sociology, where we might expect to see an interest, have given the Complete Streets phenomenon scant attention. Although they do not engage the Complete Streets concept directly, Cutts et al. (2009) are nevertheless concerned with how the combination of walkability and access to parks—two features common in the Complete Streets discourse—promote physical activity and reduce obesity. Other studies come at Complete Streets, or their correlates, from public health (Bassett et al. 2008; Geraghty et al. 2009; Moreland-Russell et al. 2013) or transportation engineering perspectives (Burden and Litman 2011; Dock et al. 2012; Laplante and McCann 2008).

Much of this existing research is limited. The public health focus on the influence of the built environment on physical activity and health typically leaves out an analysis of other important social processes shaping how people interact with space and place, whether symbolic or material. Transportation engineers focus almost exclusively on the technical aspects of the design of Complete Streets, with occasional interest in political processes that open and close doors for Complete Streets projects. Long champions of Complete Streets, progressive urban planners have yet to engage in a specifically socially just framing within their discourse. A possible exception is Day’s (2006) argument that planning for active living— defined as urban planning and design to promote physical activity—needs to address low-income, Black and Latino communities due to higher rates of obesity in these communities and fewer resources for dealing with the problem. Another application of a social justice frame, in this case from a public health perspective, occurs in Taylor et al.’s (2006) meta-analysis of published research that discusses disparities in physical activity, dietary habits, and obesity among different populations. As expected, their analysis reveals modest support for the conclusion that there is disproportionate lack of access to health-promoting urban features such as sidewalks, parks and calm traffic in low income and racial/ethnic minority communities, in turn contributing to higher rates of obesity.

Beyond peer-reviewed publications, there are a handful of reports and other analyses or recommendations for addressing the issue of equity with respect to Complete Streets policies and practices. Clifton, Bronstein and Morrissey’s undated report, “The Path to Complete Streets in Underserved Communities: Lessons from U.S. Case Studies,” makes a number of recommendations for building equity concerns into Complete Streets policies. But their approach focuses solely on the issue of transportation equity without c...