Streets: The New Frontiers for Public Space

After more than a century of sprawl, America’s metropolitan walkable urban places are overtaking driveable suburban counterparts in their market share and showing substantially higher rental premiums. The trend is leaning towards revitalising city centres as well as urbanising suburban areas. Research is beginning to show direct correlation between walkability and higher levels of GDP as well as a greater educated workforce. In addition to the obvious health and environmental benefits, research also shows that walkable areas are more socially equitable, because access to cheaper public transit and employment offsets high costs of housing.

The keys to walkability are high density, adjacency of a mixture of spatial products such as housing in proximity to oces, schools and grocery stores, and availability of multiple transportation options such as subway, rail, bus and pedestrian-friendly sidewalks, bicycles and motor vehicles. Cities like New York, Boston and Washington DC that score high on walk-score indices (https://www.walkscore.com/methodology.shtml), typically have very high transit densities, low crime grades and high levels of pedestrian-friendly design.

Prioritising the pedestrian in these environments requires a re-examination and reconfiguration of a city’s streets. Streets energise social and economic life and are essential circulatory and organisational systems for urban spaces. Designing for great streets requires planning and balancing many demands and activities throughout the day. ‘Shared Streets’, an idea well tested in Europe, is gaining traction in the United States as a means to reclaiming streets for pedestrians.

Shared Streets is an urban design approach that minimises the segregation between modes of road users and provides pedestrians the right of way. 

This is done by removing features such as curbs, road surface markings, traffic signs and traffic lights. Hans Monderman, the Dutch traffic engineer who pioneered the use of this idea in the Dutch province Frysland, has suggested: “When you don’t exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users. You automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care.”

Many narrow, crowded streets around the world already operate informally as shared streets at busy times of the day or in congested areas. Shared streets work well in places where pedestrian activity is high and vehicle volumes are low or discouraged. Recognising streets as part of the public space network adds to the vibrancy and activity with outdoor dining, public seating, artwork and landscaping. In residential areas, shared streets become the extension of front yards, places to meet neighbours and to build communities.

The transformation of Fort Street, Auckland, into a shared street turned a district into a destination, increasing visitors for shopping and other activities and showing a measurable increase in pedestrian volumes and consumer spending. Van Gogh Walk, previously Isabel Street, is the centrepiece of a resident-led project in Stockwell, a district in South London. This project has transformed a traditional street into a new, shared street and community space.

A recent successful project in the United States is The Wharf DC: the redevelopment of the Southwest Waterfront that was once a neglected and largely sequestered section of the city into a destination with high density and multi-modal transit. It now boasts being the largest expanse of ‘shared space’ streets in the country. Borrowing from the Dutch idea of the Woonerf, wherein all modes move slowly on the same plane, the designers – Perkins Eastman Architects – promote the notion of controlled chaos. Thus instead of putting a park next to the water, they opted for a street with cars.

The Wharf’s 60-feet wide signature street runs directly alongside the river’s edge overlooking its marinas. It has zones rather than lanes, indicated by subtly different patterns of grey paving; then a promenade with trees closest to the water. The street proper mixes people and cars in the middle and then an outdoor-seating zone is for restaurants. According to the designers, the trick to taming cars in the city is not to exclude them outright, but to favour pedestrians so much in the street design that drivers proceed with caution.

There are rows of street furniture, including mast-like light poles and granite bollards, along with stripes of paving separating walkways on either side from the shared space in the middle. Wharf Street has limited car access requiring a sharp, low-speed turn, thus minimising reasons for cars to turn onto it in the first place. This is achieved by encouraging other modes and by steering cars towards less pedestrian-dense areas. Centralised pickups at the edges of the site coordinated with Uber, Lyft and taxicabs also keep cars out of the middle.

Street textures form a big part of providing cues to traffic and pedestrians. 

The strips right next to the buildings have a smoother surface that’s more like a sidewalk; it helps to define the edge of this space, particularly for blind pedestrians. The rougher, fan-patterned blocks at the centre cue drivers to move slowly down the middle of the space. Narrower mews, or secondary streets, cut vertically and horizontally through the site and contrast with the sense of openness out on the new piers, all four of them, which reach like long fingers into the channel.

While the Wharf is a trendsetting example for Washington DC, the city of New York, which is considered one of the most walkable cities in the world, is constantly reclaiming its streets for pedestrians. Following the closure of Broadway to car traffucc in 2009, a permanent pedestrian plaza was created in the space by clearing out decades of old infrastructure cluttering the square. The design, led by the firm Snohetta, transformed Times Square from one of New York’s most notoriously congested spaces into a radically open civic square, while also integrating crucial utility and event infrastructure upgrades.

The new plaza on Broadway was designed to accommodate multiple speeds of pedestrian circulation with subtle design gestures that empower people to move in a natural, comfortable way through the space. A unified and cohesive ground plane made of pre-cast concrete pavers creates a strong anchor for the space. The pavers are embedded with nickel-sized steel discs that capture the neon glow from the signs above and playfully scatter it across the paving surface, referencing marquee lights and Times Square’s theatre history. Ten 50-feet granite benches oriented along the Broadway Axis define and frame the public plaza. These benches manage pedestrian flow, creating interior pockets or eddies for people to stop and gather. Simultaneously, this allows for continuous thoroughfares on either side of the benches for quicker foot traffic. 

Rather than add more visual distractions like signage, the design harnesses more implicit gestures such as the benches and renovated curbs brought up to street level, allowing users to feel psychologically at ease in an often overstimulating public space. With a significant positive impact on public safety, air quality and economic output, the project has transformed Times Square into a world-class civic space that reflects the best of Times Square and New York City, allowing the ‘Crossroads of the World’ to retain its edge while refining its floor. Since completion in 2016, the reconstruction has doubled the amount of pedestrian-only space at Manhattan’s core.

There are many initiatives that engage the public and practitioners in the dialogue to continually forecast the future of Manhattan streets. One such initiative called ‘Future Streets’ is led by the AIA New York Planning Urban Design Committee. It constitutes a cross-company collaborative think tank of various design leaders from NYC engaging collaborative dialogue about right-of-way design. Apart from the public demonstration of their ideas, the think tank proposes various urban models that can be deployed for future street initiatives. One of the partners at Arup proposed the idea of ‘prioritising streets’ where instead of providing ‘complete streets’ that accommodate all modes of transportation, which is ideal but poses a model for future contested spaces, the city could prioritise dierent streets for dierent users and constituencies. This would result in some streets as dedicated cycling streets and others as dedicated pedestrian alleyways while vehicular traffic would be assigned to certain key corridors of the city. Perkins Eastman’s proposal for shared streets offers a novel approach to the designing and zoning of the streets of Manhattan. 

The designers believe that the future of streets must be a model for shared spaces that gives priority to pedestrians, cyclists and public transit modes. Thus an expansion of the public realm into the streets will allow unparalleled access to public amenities.

For dense metropolitan cities that are reaching their capacities in terms of open space and transit, streets are becoming the new frontiers for public space. It is becoming increasingly critical to efficiently manage and optimise public right of way. Congestion pricing and the sharing economy have provided big leaps in doing exactly that. With the imminent possibility of driverless cars, questions regarding the redundancy of the parking infrastructure both along streets and in garages are looming. Driverless cars could possibly require a reimagination of the function of a street in the  same way that the automobile did to horse-drawn carriages at the turn of the 19th century. A radical rethinking of the form and function of streets is necessary.

References:
• https://smartgrowthamerica.org/app/uploads/2016/06/foot-trafficc-ahead-2016.pdf
• https://globaldesigningcities.org/publication/global-street-design-guide/streets/shared-streets/
• https://www.walkscore.com/
• https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/columns/concrete-details/article/20982817/dcs-redesigned-wharf-trades-clean-lines-for-planned-clutter
• https://ggwash.org/view/64605/preview-the-shared-streets-coming-to-the-wharf
• https://ggwash.org/view/65639/how-are-the-wharfs-shared-spaces-working-out