We all come to the world of urbanism and read cities from numerous perspectives that are shaped by our individual backgrounds, education, circumstances and experiences. Tell us how these have shaped your work and thoughts.
I’m a critical urban planning and environmental social science scholar with a combined science and social science background. I have extensive experience in local government, consulting, working for and board-level advising of NGOs and community-based organisations, which help frame my perspectives, research and writing. This enables me to thrive at the borders and intersections of a wide range of disciplines, knowledges and methodologies, which I hope to use in creative and original ways. I centre my research on critical explorations of the complex and embedded relations between humans and the urban environment, whether mediated by governments or social movement organisations and their effects on public policy and planning processes and outcomes, particularly in relation to notions of justice and equity. I strongly believe that what our cities can become (sustainable, smart, sharing and resilient) and who is allowed to belong in them (recognition of difference, diversity and a Right to the City) are fundamentally and inextricably interlinked. We must therefore act on both belonging and becoming together, using just sustainabilities as the anchor, or face deepening spatial and social inequities and inequalities.
The Complete Streets movement is all around us today, seeking to create multi-modal streets for pedestrians, bicyclists, transit riders, motorists etc. and striving to increase walkability in automobile-dominated urban landscapes across the world. Yet, many fail to realise that this idea of Complete Streets was introduced in 2003 by a staff member of a North-American bicycle advocacy organisation, America Bikes, to include bicycles in transportation planning. It was a transportation-reform initiative in a developed society. It was never meant to engage with the social and cultural complexities of informal street life. Studies have increasingly shown that Complete Street policies and projects, crafted by professionals and experts, often exacerbate guises of inequality, including – but hardly limited to – marginalised entities: vendors, homeless, the poor etc. Aren’t Complete Streets really incomplete in this sense?
Universal Design – making spaces that are accessible to people with varying physical abilities, learning and emotional disabilities, sensory impairments and communication limitations – is a good example of how we in the West ‘overclaim’ in urban planning and design terminology.
Yet Universal Design has nothing to say about culturally accessible spaces, so in what way is it universal? Similarly, Complete Streets is an overclaim; who are they complete for? Who gets to say what is complete?
The United States’ narratives of Complete Streets, Transit-Oriented Development and Liveable Streets are sub-frames of the larger urban planning narrative of Placemaking. They frame a message that we can all agree with: that streets are ultimately public spaces and that everyone in the community should have equal rights to space within them, irrespective of whether they are in a car or not. Implicit in this is the recognition that those who have fewer rights are often those with lower incomes who do not own cars.
But can the current Complete Streets discourse, design manuals and policies actually reverse the inequalities that car-centric planning exacerbated or created anew? Or will it result in enhanced liveability only for the most privileged residents of cities?
There is ample evidence that Complete Streets contribute to ‘greenlining’, creating socio-economically elite neighbourhoods where rents and house prices are higher. I agree with Massey (1995) who sees 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. Consequently, there are important missing narratives in the Complete Streets movement, discourse and practice.
Incomplete Streets, which you’ve edited, brings together a range of voices on this critical theme. I found this collection particularly insightful and provocative because it highlighted the marginalised and invisible aspects of streets all across the world that most planners take for granted. How would you summarise this volume’s main takeaways? What might urban designers and planners seek to learn from this volume?
The overwhelming majority of our authors laid out evidence that there are ‘silent’ or ‘silenced’ voices regarding the Complete Streets movement and there is indeed reproduction and, in some cases, an amplification or deepening of inequalities/injustices as a result. First, they argue that streets are complex spaces and places with many functions. To assume that a street can ever be complete, in the sense of being fixed and unchanging, is folly. Even if physical streetscapes remain relatively unchanged, the human stories we tell about our streets are constantly evolving. Second, Complete Streets become synonymous with the highly regulated walkable, liveable cities that are assumed to be vibrant and successful only to the extent that they attract and retain the Creative Class (Florida 2002). Third, using Complete Streets as a tool to attract the Creative Class is perceived by many to be a harbinger of gentrification, which in turn raises concerns for the diversity and equitability of cities. In these ways, Incomplete Streets highlights the crisis of ‘belonging’ that I mentioned earlier. As urban professionals, we’re great at prescribing what our streets can ‘become’ (Complete) but not good at ensuring the ‘belonging’ of poorer people, once streets become Complete, because of gentrification.
If urban designers and planners learn one thing, I’d like it to be that streets are not simply physical design challenges, amenable to design solutions, but rather they are complex socio-cultural ecosystems that need deep urban ethnographic analysis and community participation prior to the Complete Streets treatment.
While planning and sociology scholars increasingly call our attention to the street as the domain of populist spontaneity and appropriation, I find that at its worst, this is a passive, romantic and largely socially-focused observational analysis. Such studies offer little on how to actually engage with and mitigate the problems in these environments. On the other hand, architects and urban designers are more than happy to transform streets into delightful outdoor rooms. Here the emphasis is on urban form and space, with little reflection or awareness on the social consequences you point out. Most street enhancements by designers are founded on the idea that a complete street will bring about great urban life. I don’t think it is an ‘either-or’ agenda. Streets are the settings of spontaneous urban life, but this need not deny them of great design. Where does one draw the line? Can these apparent oppositions be reconciled?
Under our current neoliberal regime, where we design and build cities for (rich) people to invest in, not (poor) people to live in, we do face the problems of ecological or green gentrification. Walkability and cyclability, two key aspects of gentrified neighbourhoods, are measurable, therefore quantifiable, and used by realtors. Some cities are experimenting with the ‘just green enough’ approach (cleaning neighbourhoods but falling short of the full greening treatment); developing Community Land Trusts, developing affordable housing policies before Complete Streets programmes are installed and funding through ‘patient capital’ (funding that’s not looking for a quick return and that stays in the neighbourhood). I think cities need to really look, with community organisations, at how to reconcile these positions. Ultimately, we need to work out how to decouple more sustainable neighbourhoods from gentrification.
You have been a strong advocate of ‘Just Sustainabilities’. Can you elaborate?
Beginning as a critique of what I eventually called the ‘equity deficit’ that still pervades most ‘green’ and ‘environmental’ sustainability theory, rhetoric and practice, the just sustainabilities concept began to take shape in the early 2000s, when myself, Bob Bullard and Bob Evans wrote: “Sustainability cannot be simply a ‘green’ or ‘environmental’ concern, important though ‘environmental’ aspects of sustainability are. A truly sustainable society is one where the wider question of social needs and welfare and economic opportunity are integrally related to environmental limits imposed by supporting ecosystems.”
Integrating social needs and welfare offers us a more ‘just’, rounded, equity-focused definition of sustainability and sustainable development while not negating the very real environmental threats. Just sustainabilities can be defined as: “The need to ensure a better quality of life for all, now and into the future, in a just and equitable manner, whilst living within the limits of supporting ecosystems.” (Agyeman, et al., 2003, 5).
In many ways, the Incomplete Streets thesis is a great example of unjust sustainabilities in that Complete Streets as currently practiced can lower some people’s quality of life and wellbeing via gentrification and displacement.
Complete Streets can also be unjust and inequitable in that you need to pay a high premium to live within these ‘greenlined’ neighbourhoods. Unlike explicitly racist ‘redlining’ in US cities in the 1930s where lenders refused to lend money or extend credit to borrowers of colour in certain areas, greenlining is socio-economic segregation, not explicitly racist. However, in the US there is a very close correlation between wealth and race so the outcome of socio-economic segregation tends to look very much like racial segregation.
In your world, what is the place and role of a Las Ramblas in Barcelona, Champs Elysees in Paris, Ometsando in Tokyo or Raj Path in Delhi? There is an aspect of streets throughout human history as wonderfully designed rooms for all, rich and poor. Why can’t the formal design of streets be a means of economic mediation and social equity? Is your argument of Incomplete Streets itself incomplete in this regard?
The fabulous streets you mention are in fact examples, to a greater or lesser extent, of ‘wonderfully designed rooms for all, rich and poor.’ There is no reason why design shouldn’t increase equity. But we have a long way to go before we reach there in the Complete Streets story, as carried out in North America, the focus of our book.
Here, I defer to Vikas Mehta’s ‘ecology of streets’ concept. In our book, he argues that we should not complete our streets and that the contemporary Complete Streets concept is “inadequate and even deceptive as it flattens this rich ecology to a set of limited mobility-related ‘quality of life’ goals.” He is taking aim at the same neoliberal environmental gentrification processes I’ve mentioned that offer up measurable, quantifiable community attributes such as increases in ‘walkability’, ‘cyclability’ and ‘liveability’ that often portend gentrification. If city authorities started from the question ‘Complete Streets for whom?’, we might see streets as celebrations of inter-culturalism, public space, the beauty of the human spirit and environmental sustainability.
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