Living Streets

Strategies for Crafting Public Space

Lesley Bain, Barbara Gray, Dave Rodgers

• Verlag: Wiley
• Jahr: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118182000
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Architettura
• Thema: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

The only book of its kind to provide an overview of sustainable street design

Today, society is moving toward a more sustainable way of life, with cities everywhere aspiring to become high-quality places to live, work, and play. Streets are fundamental to this shift. They define our system of movement, create connections between places, and offer opportunities to reconnect to natural systems. There is an increasing realization that the right-of-way is a critical and under-recognized resource for transformation, with new models being tested to create a better public realm, support balanced transportation options, and provide sustainable solutions for stormwater and landscaping.

Living Streets provides practical guidance on the complete street approach to sustainable and community-minded street use and design. Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, the book brings insights and experience from urban planning, transportation planning, and civil engineering perspectives. It includes examples from many completed street design projects from around the world, an overview of the design and policy tools that have been successful, and guidance to help get past the predictable obstacles to implementation: Who makes decisions in the right-of-way? Who takes responsibility? How can regulations be changed to allow better use of the right-of-way?

Living Streets informs you of the benefits of creating streets that are healthier, more pleasant parts of life:

• Thoughtful planning of the location, uses, and textures of the spaces in which we live encourages people to use public space more often, be more active, and possibly live healthier lives.
• A walkable community makes life easier and more pleasant for everyone, especially for vulnerable populations within the larger community whose transportation limitations reduce access to jobs, healthy food, health care, recreation, and social interaction.
• Streets present opportunities to improve the natural environment while adding to neighborhood character, offering beauty, providing shade, and improving air quality.

If you're an urban planner, designer, transportation engineer, or civil engineer, Living Streets is the ultimate guide for the creation of more humane streetscapes that connect neighborhoods and inspire people.

Chapter 1

Placemaking in the Public Right-of-Way

Streets are more than just places to drive. Streets are spaces in themselves, and a valuable part of the public realm. This simple concept is lost in much of the common understanding of the right-of-way. Mobility is thought of as the only function, but movement is one of several roles that the right-of-way can play. The paradigm becomes quite different if street design is approached from a multi-use, spatial standpoint rather than a single-purpose traffic function. The right-of-way becomes more than just something to move through as efficiently as possible. It can be considered as a network of spaces with a mix of uses and users, with spatial qualities and unique contexts. Streets can be conceived and designed to best support the life of communities in a variety of roles. It is a paradigm that needs exploring.

“Placemaking” means making spaces where people want to spend time. What makes a place where people choose to spend their time? A successfully conceived place often has qualities that are memorable—someone could describe it to you and you would know exactly where they meant. Often, there is something unusual about the space, a rich character that makes the space stand out from the places around it. A beautiful and distinctive view, large trees, or historic buildings can give voice to the local community and its culture. A well-designed spot, if it reflects the character and needs of the unique local culture, can provide a sense of place and setting around which that culture can center itself. Placemaking springs from understanding the local conditions and recognizing the opportunities that these conditions and cultures offer (Figure 1-1).

Figure 1-1

The Function of Places

In a healthy city, creating good public space in the right-of-way cannot be an afterthought. “People want to live in places that cultivate connectedness—to the physical city itself as well as the people in it,” says urbanist Dan Bertolet. “True cities, small and large alike, have the power to bring people together.”1 It is the interchange of ideas and shared experience that brings vibrancy to urban areas, and it takes shared spaces to accomplish what cities do best.

Great urban areas have a variety of types and sizes of public spaces. Large parks and playgrounds, libraries, community centers, and schools are public spaces outside of the right-of-way. These public spaces are important hearts of civic life. The right-of-way plays a less recognized but equally critical role as both connective tissue and as a place in its own right.

In the densest cities, the right-of-way offers opportunities for much needed open space. The City of New York has the equivalent of 64 square miles of right-of-way, occupying as much space as fully 50 Central Parks.2 In cities as dense as New York, finding enough open space to serve everyone is very challenging. The City of New York has found that underutilized portions of right-of-way can be reclaimed for plaza spaces. These transformed spaces are an important part of the City’s effort to offer quality open space within a 10-minute walk for all residents (Figure 1-2).

Figure 1-2 A plaza created from right-of-way offers open space for a Brooklyn neighborhood. Photographer: Paul Iano

But it is not only the densest urban areas that need quality public spaces. The sad fact that over 60 percent of Americans are overweight is an indication that we are not getting enough exercise.3 Placemaking in the streets—creating pleasant places to be outdoors and to move between destinations—improves the odds that more people will choose to walk.

Placemaking offers a wide range of benefits to a wide range of communities. Attractive sidewalks bring shoppers to Main Streets. Landscaping and street trees that beautify the right-of-way also benefit air quality and water quality. Quality places entice people to make optional trips to walk and to enjoy time out-of-doors. Bringing people together helps build social bonds in neighborhoods. Investments in the public realm, thoughtfully sited and designed, bring many tangible and intangible returns (Figures 1-3 and 1-4).

Figure 1-3 Quality public spaces offer numerous direct and indirect benefits for communities.

Figure 1-4 Active uses along the edge and places to sit make streets comfortable and interesting.

Why Invest in a Quality Public Realm?

“The measure of a city’s greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces.”4

John Ruskin

Why does a quality public realm matter? It can be easy to take for granted the profound impact our surroundings, and the quality of those surroundings, has on our daily lives. The spaces around us shape our lives, and everyone has a stake in this—from business owners who want to see their retail districts become profitable, to health experts encouraging exercise, to a commuter who uses the sidewalk to reach the bus stop on his daily trip to work—everyone has a stake in the public realm.

The public realm can:

• Create excellent places to live, work, and play

Good outdoor spaces make the adjacent indoor spaces better. A place to sit and eat lunch in the sunshine during lunch hour, a pleasant jogging path, or a safe way for children to walk to the playground—together spatial details like these create desirable communities.

• Strengthen community interaction

Neighbors get to know one another when they spend time in the public realm. When people work together to create shared spaces or activities—community gardens, “walking school buses” where children walk to school together, or improved retail districts—the bonds of the community increase. This is a theme that is heard again and again in successful cases of community-building efforts.

• Encourage healthier lifestyles

People were made to walk. Our sedentary lifestyles have become problematic, in part because walking in spaces that are unpleasant and difficult to navigate has become unpleasant and difficult. Rethinking how the right-of-way is designed and used can help to reverse this trend.

• Develop local economies

When people live within walking distance of stores and services, then they can spend less time traveling. They can spend money in their own neighborhoods, strengthening their local communities instead of bringing their business elsewhere. Attractive Main Streets provide more human-scaled alternatives to regional malls with chain stores and vast parking lots. When the quality of the public realm is outstanding, people will also come from other neighborhoods, turning local treasures into destinations. Cities that have made active and unique public spaces, such as the Riverwalk in San Antonio, Texas, or Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Spain, attract tourists from all over the world, in addition to local residents.

• Promote urban patterns that are less dependent on fossil fuels

Besides being healthier for individuals, a good public realm makes for healthier cities. Walking and bicycling should be convenient, attractive choices for many daily destinations.

Placemaking and Design

Streets, like all spaces, have three-dimensional characteristics. Streets are not just a flat plane on which to travel, but a volume of space, a kind of large “outdoor room,” in which the surface of the street serves as a “floor,” and the surrounding buildings serve as the “walls.” Like any indoor space, streets have edges and enclosure (Figure 1-5).

Figure 1-5 The patterned stone makes a high-quality “floor” to the space.

The edges of a space define its volumetric character. When buildings line the street, serving as its walls, the activities they offer can encourage people to use the street. James Kunstler notes that “whether in the garden at home, or on Main Street, people like to feel sheltered and protected. We’re attracted to arbors, pergolas, street arcades, even awnings...Buildings, therefore, are used to define and control space, and, by making it comprehensible to the human mind, make that space appear safe and welcoming.”5 We enjoy spaces that are scaled appropriately for use by people, interpreting them as cozy, intimate, or safe. We feel invited to spend time there. When streets have poorly defined edges, large empty spaces, and are sized for cars and trucks instead of people, the space instead becomes isolating, intimidating, and even dangerous, encouraging us to move through it and leave it quickly, just as the vehicles are doing. The poorly defined boundaries make the road appear larger than it actually is, with the space “bleeding” off into parking lots or empty spaces.

Some designers feel that there are ideal proportions for street sections, with building heights proportional to the street width. For instance, a 66-foot-wide street, lined with one-story buildings, 15 feet high at both sides of the street at the property lines, would have a building height to street ratio of under 1:4. If the street had wider streets or lower buildings, the definition of spatial volume begins to be lost. Two-story buildings (about a 1:3 ratio) or three-story buildings (about a 1:2 ratio) feel more comfortable to most people. Very dense cities may have very high ratios of building height to street width, which shade the street for much of the day and can create wind tunnels (Figure 1-6).

Figure 1-6 Trees in the street and the median create a volume of space that deemphasizes the travel lanes. In this case, the trees compensate for the lack of buildings along the street edge.

There are many ways to successfully suggest edge conditions, such as lining the space with mature street trees. It is not only the height of the edge in relationship to the width of the street that matters, but also the continuity of the edge conditions. Interesting streets may have a sequence along their length, perhaps with enclosures along blocks and openings at intersections. Some of the most problematic streets have insufficient definition along th...