Images of the Street

Planning, Identity and Control in Public Space

Nicholas Fyfe

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780415154413
• eBook ISBN: 9781134734405
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

Images of the Street captures the vitality, excitements and tensions of the street. Using examples from the U.K, India, Australia and North America the contributors draw on research in cultural geography, sociolgy, cultural studies and planning to explore the making and meaning of urban space.
Among the themes examined are: 1.the way streetscapes are shaped by interplay between politics, planning and local political economy 2.social differences of individuals experiences' of the street 3.how social identities are shaped and represented in fiction and film 4.the meaning and significance of streets as settings to play out social practices 5.how social life is regulated on the street, formerly by police and indirectly through architecture and urban design

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INTRODUCTION

READING THE STREET

Nicholas R. Fyfe

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Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets.

Jacobs, 1961: 39

Streets, as Jane Jacobs reminds us, have always held a particular fascination for those interested in the city. Streets are the terrain of social encounters and political protest, sites of domination and resistance, places of pleasure and anxiety. Located at the intersection of several academic disciplines, the street is also the focus of many theoretical debates about the city concerning modern and, more recently, postmodern urbanism. For modernists the street is a space ‘from which to get from A to B, rather than a place to live in’, displacing the street ‘from lifeworld to system’, (Lash and Friedmann, 1992: 10); for postmodernists, the street is a place designed to foster and complement new urban lifestyles, reclaiming the street from system to lifeworld. Exploring these and many other readings of the street, this volume subjects the street to sustained critical scrutiny. An international, cross-disciplinary set of essays, it explores how streets as specific, local landscapes manifest broader social and cultural processes, establishing the strategic importance of the street to wider theoretical questions about the interplay between society and space. What, for example, does the design of streets reveal about dominant ideas in politics and planning? How are social identities and social practices shaped by people's experiences of the street? Does increasing social control signal the end of the street as a ‘public’ space? These are some of the key issues addressed by contributions to this volume. The street which ‘has occupied a cherished place in the lexicon of urbanism’ (Keith, 1995: 297) is, of course, no stranger to such scrutiny. Nevertheless, much of our current understanding of the meaning and significance of the street appears dominated by a small number of studies of very particular streets.

URBANISM AND THE STREET: TAKING THE ‘GRAND TOUR’

Look through two volumes reprinting what are considered to be some of the most significant contributions to understanding urbanism this century (Kasnitz, 1995; Le Gates and Stout, 1996), and you will find that each offers a very similar ‘tour’ of city streets. In the company of Walter Benjamin, Le Corbusier, Jane Jacobs and Mike Davis, the reader is taken down broad boulevards and high speed expressways, through communities where residents participate in daily ‘street ballets’ and on to ‘mean streets’ where an underclass fight for survival. Although the work of these urban commentators clearly represents only a fraction of what has been written about the street, it is to these classics that many other influential accounts of the city and its streets, as well as many of the contributors to this volume, so often refer (see, for example, Berman, 1983; Sennett, 1990; Sudjic, 1992; Young, 1990). It will therefore be useful to begin by taking the ‘grand tour’ of city streets before looking in more detail at the individual chapters.

The tour begins in mid- to late nineteenth century Paris with Walter Benjamin's observations on that self-styled ‘artist in demolition’, Baron Haussmann and his ‘constructive destruction’ of the city to make way for the straight, wide boulevards of his new urban circulatory system (Benjamin, 1995). The surgical overtones of the phrase ‘circulatory system’ are not unimportant. As Ellin (1997a) notes, Haussmann viewed the city as a sick organism with his task that of the surgeon cutting out infected areas and opening up clogged arteries. According to Benjamin, however, these surgical metaphors should not obscure ‘The true purpose of Haussmann's work’, namely to ‘secure the city against civil war’ (Benjamin, 1995: 54). While it is certainly true that the breadth of streets made the erection of barricades difficult and their straightness provided infantry with a long line of fire, Benjamin's singular reading of Haussmann's boulevards misses other significant implications of their construction. The boulevards had an important economic function, helping to quicken the pace of commerce; socially, large numbers of the working-classes were employed in their construction while the routes of the boulevards caused some dispersion and displacement of working class communities; and, symbolically, they provided an unequivocal demonstration of the power of the state to shape the urban landscape in the interests of the bourgeoisie (see Ellin, 1997a: 18-19).

Although the physical legacy of Haussmann's work was enormously important, so too was its clear articulation of that modernist understanding of the street, that ‘Streets had been for walking to work or shops and for socialising. Now they were primarily for movement’ (Ellin, 1997a: 13). This was to be strongly endorsed by the architect and planner Le Corbusier and it is the streets of his planned ‘Contemporary City’ of 1922 that provide the next stop on this ‘grand tour’. To be built on the Right Bank of the Seine, this was to be a city of high towers, open spaces and new kinds of streets. According to Le Corbusier, ‘The corridor street “should be tolerated no longer” because it is full of noise and dust, deprived of light and so ‘poisons the houses that border it’ (Le Corbusier, 1996: 371). Although this use of a medical metaphor harks back to Haussmann, it is the city as machine which provides the central metaphor of Le Corbusier's urban vision. The corridor street must be replaced by a new type of street which will be ‘a machine for traffic’ (quoted in Berman, 1983: 167) used exclusively by fast-moving mechanical vehicles, and free from pedestrians and building fronts. Although this would mean the abolition of the street and with it the crowd and many other activities, for Le Corbusier it was a price worth paying. Capturing the modernist spirit, he declared, ‘A city made for speed is made for success’ (Le Corbusier, 1996: 375). Unfortunately for Le Corbusier, his Contemporary City proposal won him few planning commissions and it was not until the construction of Brasilia in 1960 which drew strongly on his ideas that the implications of a city without streets became apparent. In place of the street, Brasilia substitutes high-speed avenues and residential cul-de-sacs, a configuration which doesn't simply erase a particular type of space (the street) but also undermines particular forms of social and political life. As Holston's (1989) fascinating study reveals, Brasilia is a city without ‘street corner societies’ where people might gossip informally and exchange information because there are no street corners and people therefore rely more on domestic and private spaces for social interation. And Brasilia is a city without crowds because by abolishing the street the planners effectively destroyed those public spaces where people might meet to express and debate their political beliefs and through which the public sphere of civic life is both represented and constituted (Holston, 1989: 103). If, as many have claimed, ‘revolutions entail a taking to the streets’ (Mitchell, 1995: 124; but see also Berman, 1983, 1986), Le Corbusier's ideas represent a neat counter-revolutionary strategy.

Next stop on the tour is 1960s New York and the streets of Greenwich Village from where Jane Jacobs (1961; see also Jacobs, 1995, 1996) made her vehement attack on the Corbusian tradition of expressways and tower blocks. Le Corbusier had visited New York some thirty years earlier, delighting in the simplicity with which it was possible to navigate the city because of the regular street grid: ‘the streets are at right angles to each other and the mind is liberated’ (Le Corbusier, 1995: 100). However, he went on to observe ‘an urban no man's land made up of miserable low buildings in poor streets of dirty red brick’ and it was precisely from such streets that ‘the great refutation of his model of urbanism would be launched’ (Kasnitz, 1995: 93). Jacobs describes in vivid detail the rhythms of daily life on Hudson Street in Greenwich Village, arguing that streets play a central role in establishing urban communal life and, in particular, in promoting safety. To achieve this, however, it is essential for the street to be ‘multifunctional’, not the exclusive domain of traffic, and for there to be ‘eyes on the street’ belonging to local inhabitants and traders who are able to provide neighbourhood surveillance of activities taking place on the street.

While the contrast with Le Corbusier's vision of the street could hardly be greater, the almost pastoral image of self-regulating street life that Jacobs conjures up (Berman, 1983: 324) also stands in stark contrast to the final destination on this ‘grand tour’, the streets of contemporary Los Angeles. Displaying ‘the gritty street-wise pluck of the truck driver-flâneur (Soja, 1997: 27), Mike Davis guides us round the ‘Mean Streets’ of LA, pointing out the ‘bumproof benches, sprinkler systems and regular police patrols as evidence of the city's ‘relentless struggle to make the streets as unliveable as possible for the homeless and the poor’ (Davis, 1995: 362; see also Davis, 1996). Although Davis's account has been criticised by those who feel his ‘overheated rhetorical excesses often seem to overwhelm rational discourse’ (Legates and Stout, 1996: 158), his disturbing images of ‘the inhumanity of Downtown streets’ (ibid.: 365; Soja calls them ‘sadistic street environments’, 1997: 27), do highlight two important and related themes of postmodern urbanism. First, these images underline the way in which ‘form follows fear’ in the contemporary urban environment (see Ellin, 1996, 1997b); secondly, they point to an increasing erosion of democratic public space (see Sorkin, 1992; Christopherson, 1994).

The importance of this tour of city streets in terms of providing wider insights into urban society should not be underestimated. These studies can be used individually and collectively to illustrate how streets are sites and signs of discipline and disorder, symptoms and symbols of modern and postmodern urbanism. Further, these studies show how streets can be viewed as both ‘representations of space’, the discursively constructed spaces of planners and architects, and ‘spaces of representation’, the spaces of everyday life of ‘inhabitants’ and ‘users’ (Lefebvre, 1991). Nevertheless, this ‘grand tour’ clearly has many limitations. Most obviously it is tied to an extremely narrow range of historical, geographical and cultural settings and therefore inevitably fails to engage with the heterogeneity of streets located in different times and spaces. More significantly, this ‘grand tour’ relies on limited methodological positions. At one extreme is Le Corbusier who sees the street (to borrow Lefebvre's phrase), ‘from on high and from afar’ (quoted in Gregory, 1994: 404); at the other, the accounts of both Jacobs and Davis involve the ‘epistemological privileging of the experience of the flâneur, the street-wandering free agent of everyday life’ (Soja, 1997: 21). These empirical and methodological limitations, in turn, inevitably circumscribe the theoretical contribution of the ‘grand tour’. While the descriptions and analysis of the different streets on the tour can, as suggested above, be used in broader theoretical debates about society and space, individually these accounts are only weakly informed by specific theoretical ideas. It is against this background that the essays in this volume attempt to enrich our understanding of the street.

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE ESSAYS

The contributions are grouped around three broad themes: ‘Planning and Design’, ‘Social Identities and Social Practices’, and ‘Control and Resistance’. The first section, ‘Planning and Design’, establishes the importance of seeing streets as environments constructed by knowledgeable agents situated within particular social, political and economic settings. Streetscapes are very much ‘a synthesis of charisma and context, a text which may be read to reveal the force of dominant ideas and prevailing practices as well as the idiosyncrasies of a particular author’ (Ley and Duncan, 1993: 329; see also Appleyard, 1981; Çelik, Favro and Ingersoll, 1994, and Moudon, 1991). Comprising four essays organised in chronological order, the first by David Atkinson examines the restructuring of Rome under the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini, focusing on the creation of streets which would both express the ideological agenda and stage the rituals and performances of fascism. Of these streets, the Via del Mare (the Road to the Sea) begun in 1926 was one of the most ambitious projects and Atkinson's study provides intriguing insights into the making of totalitarian urban space. Standing in stark contrast to this broad, monumental boulevard constructed in central Rome are the narrow, winding streets of Pollok, a municipal suburb to the south of Glasgow begun in the 1930s. Built to take those displaced by redevelopment in Glasgow's inner city, the design of Pollok, as Gerry Mooney's chapter reveals, drew inspiration from the representations of space produced by the Garden City movement and this is partly expressed in the network of broad, tree-lined streets and narrow, curving roads laid out in sympathy with the local, undulating topography. One of the central themes of Mooney's chapter, however, is that streetscapes rarely reflect a straightforward application of some visionary model (in Pollok the pressures to house more and more people lead to the construction of four- and five-storey tenements on streets originally designed for two-storey cottages) and this theme is reworked in John Gold's chapter in the context of modernist plans to replace the traditional street. The impulse for many of these plans came from an acute sense that the street had become a ‘battleground’ between competing and conflicting uses: motor vehicles and pedestrians, local and through traffic, commercial and private activities. Although Le Corbusier had vigorously attacked the waste and inefficiency of the rue corridor, Gold shows that there remained an important gap between the visions of Le Corbusier (and other modernists) and blueprints for street planning. ‘The boulevard might be dead’, Gold observes, ‘but the urban expressway was yet to arrive’. By considering the work of the British Modern Movement in the 1940s, Gold illustrates how this gap between vision and practice provided scope for considerable experimentation with multi-level, functionally defined circulation systems. Finally, in this first section, Richard Levy provides a glimpse of how current Computer Aided Design (CAD) technology is being used to transform the planning and design of streets. Using animations and virtual reality it is now possible to simulate the pedestrian experience of a planned streetscape, allowing people to see its impact, quite literally, on their view of the environment. Impressive though this technology is, arguably its greatest potential impact is in democratising the design process by allowing anyone with access to a television or computer screen a simulated experience of plans proposed for their community.

In Part II, the focus shifts from the making of streetscapes to explore the meaning and significance of the street in relation to social identities and social practices. By focusing on these themes, the essays in this section contribute to wider debates which question the view that as public spaces streets are universally accessible to a civic public, and provide evidence of how streets can be an active medium through which social identities are created and contested (see Ruddick, 1996: 133–5). Jane Rendell's vivid account of the male rambler on the streets of early nineteenth-century London offers, at one level, an intriguing series of observations on the social, cultural and economic geography of the city, as the rambler takes to the street and guides the reader between sites of leisure and pleasure (theatres, opera houses and parks), consumption and exchange (the main shopping streets, private arcades and bazaars). But these urban explorations have a wider theoretical relevance. The movement of the male rambler through the streets reveals much about the gendering of urban space and his mobility suggests that the relationships between gender and space are more complex than established ideas concerning the ‘separate spheres’ of the male public realm and the female private realm. In contrast to the mobility of the rambler is the more restricted movement of those with disabilities examined by Brendan Gleeson. Piecing together a fragmentary historical record, Gleeson reveals the strategic importance of the street in the lives of disabled people in colonial Melbourne. Their inabiliry to meet the mobility requirements of industrial capitalism, with its separation of work and home, combined with the desire of those in authority to confine the disabled to the workhouse, asylum or jail, meant that the very presence of disabled people on the streets, as beggars or street-traders, represented a minor victory for those struggling for some sense of inclusion in an exclusionary society. The disabled also feature in the following chapter as one group among the diverse array of people who make up the homeless living on the streets of contemporary Britain and North America. Linking together some of the reasons for homelessness, Gerald Daly unravels a complex chain of events and decisions in which the personal becomes enmeshed in the political and the economic, the local in the global. Daly shows how, once on the stre...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• IMAGES OF THE STREET
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: reading the street
• PART I PLANNING AND DESIGN
• PART II SOCIAL IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL PRACTICES
• PART III CONTROL AND RESISTANCE
• Index