rando
04-25-07, 02:04 PM
Another interesting article on public spaces from pps.org.
A civilising influence
By Clare Dowdy
Published: April 20 2007 18:37 | Last updated: April 20 2007 18:37
Parents screaming at their children to get out of the way of speeding vehicles, cars parked all over the kerbs and neighbours barely on nodding terms. It’s a typical scenario in many of the world’s cities, suburbs and even small towns. But if an enlightened band of planning experts, traffic engineers and community activists has its way, it’s one that will soon be eradicated.
Take Mina Road in St Werburghs, Bristol, in the UK. The 45 families who live on it recently secured £12,500 to narrow the once busy road to a single running lane wide enough to let cars and bicycles pass safely, to introduce parallel parking and to install planters to distract drivers into slowing down.
Resident Simon Groves, who also happens to be a member of the local county council’s traffic management team, now describes his street as a little enclave. “It’s much more chilled out,” he says. “I know everyone by name and people are looking after the place.”
He isn’t sure whether the transform-ation has resulted in higher house prices but says the neighbourhood is now “desired by families with young kids because it’s a safe place to be”. Each planter has been adopted by a household; his only disappointment is that they haven’t been filled with shrubs big enough to hide the parked cars.
The efforts of the St Werburghs residents are a shining example of an urban planning philosophy – often labelled Home Zone or Shared Space – that has developed over the past three decades and promotes sensitive street design as a way to create more people-friendly environments.
“We should learn to build villages in the way they were built in the past,” says Hans Monderman, the Dutch engineer seen as the father of Shared Space. He is not advocating unpaved roads, horse-drawn transport and reinstating stocks – he just wants neighbourhoods that work for everyone, satisfying residents as well as moving traffic along. Cars, he argues, have been allowed to dominate residential areas, particularly in suburbs, for far too long, and quality of life has declined has a result.
The Home Zone approach tends to focus on a single residential street or neighbourhood. These zones are characterised by having no separate raised pavements but instead a variety of surface treatments: trees, planting and street furniture to define and screen car parking; bollards and street lighting to illuminate the space. “They look to extend the social domain by reducing the areas designed for traffic flow,” says British urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie. “There is a variety and richness of detail because each community has been involved. And for areas where people don’t have big gardens, they use the street for sitting and chatting.”
Shared Space typically involves larger-scale projects in which many roads in a city or town are stripped back to their bare minimum to inspire a more harmonious relationship between drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Measures are sometimes counter-intuitive, making roads more confusing so that drivers are forced to slow down. In a typical scheme, out go the all the road signs, traffic lights, kerbs and zebra crossings and in come narrower streets and new paving. The resulting ambiguity encourages eye contact and integrates cars into a “social zone”.
The idea behind both strategies is the same, Monderman says. “Public space has always been the most important space in society” and traffic engineers must respect it. “We create context,” he explains. “When you want people to behave as if they are in a church, you have to build a church.” And when you want drivers to feel as if they are in a community, not just passing through it, roads must look like lanes, not thoroughfares.
Monderman has so far spearheaded more than 100 Shared Space schemes in the Dutch region of Friesland. In the village of Opeinde the division between road and pavement is now indistinguishable and road markings and signs have been removed. Traffic still flows – but at a leisurely pace of about 30km per hour – and the streets have been reclaimed by playing children, cyclists and barking dogs.
In Drachten, a town with 45,000 residents, junctions with traffic lights and roundabouts have also been rejected in favour of “squareabouts”, a Monderman signature feature in which cars flow through pedestrian squares. Owen Paterson, the UK Conservative party’s transport spokesman, visited the Laweiplein intersection earlier this year as research for a policy paper on roads and, even when he stood in the middle of traffic, did not elicit a single act of road rage. Some people shook their heads but not one person honked or gestured menacingly.
“Removing traffic lights leads to the perception of danger a little bit of risk should be part of life otherwise you get accidents,” says Monderman, who is now in his 60s. “That’s a difficult message. But when you give people responsibility and stop interfering, you can trust people. The cost is [also] lower because lights are expensive and you don’t have to change the system. It’s permanent.”
Since traffic lights were ditched at Laweiplein in 2003, the number of accidents has dropped and, as Paterson’s visit shows, it is now a mecca for engineers, planners and politicians. Results in the Swedish town of Norrköping, home to the country’s first Shared Space scheme, have also been encouraging, says Christer Hyden, professor of technology and society at Lund University. Studies show that “the average speed [is now] 13km an hour, which more or less guarantees that there will be no severe accidents,” he explains.
Larger communities have successfully used Shared Space principles to reclaim the public realm, too. These include the European cities of Copenhagen in Denmark, Barcelona in Spain, Lyon and Strasbourg in France and Freiburg in Germany; Portland, Oregon, in the US; Curitiba in Brazil; Córdoba in Argentina; and Melbourne in Australia.
[B]Jan Gehl, professor of urban design at the School of Architecture in Copenhagen, has orchestrated the Danish capital’s transformation, much of it focused on the humble bicycle. Cycle traffic lights are, for example, timed to turn green six seconds before those for cars. Most of the city’s four-lane roads are gone, reduced to two with a waiting lane for cyclists in the middle. And downtown street parking is being axed, with car parks created on the outskirts instead.
Thanks to these measures, Copen-hagen now has the lowest car use in any European city and 36 per cent of residents cycle, double the level of 10 years ago and six times higher than in London. “The more bikes there are, the safer it is to cycle because of the critical mass,” Gehl says. [Melbourne has also made great strides in traffic management, three years ago introducing new, wider pavements in local bluestone and better quality street furniture and lighting. More recently it installed Copenhagen-like cycle lanes. According to Gehl, there are now 40 per cent more people walking the city’s streets than a decade ago.
The trend doesn’t stop at developed western countries either. Gehl is also working in the Jordanian capital of Amman, which has “a very active and idealistic mayor” in Omar Al Ma’ani. “He is eager that the city shouldn’t develop into a big traffic jam like other Middle Eastern cities but many wealthy people are coming from Iraq in cars,” Gehl says. So “we are using the concept of pedestrian priority streets, including Home Zones.”
Hamilton-Baillie, who is also a consultant to UK conservation body English Heritage, thinks that these schemes serve to reintroduce civility into communities. “The whole system of conventional urban traffic planning is the systematic removal of civility,” he explains.
Gehl agrees. “In a traditional city public spaces were for meeting, marketing and moving. But in the past century the moving has taken over.”
Although northern Europe has led the way in the Home Zone and Shared Space movements, the latest spin-offs can be found in the UK. The busy shopping area of High Street Kensington in London has been refurbished to try to reduced traffic speeds, and Sustrans, the green transport charity, has launched a new project called DIY Streets and is on the hunt for 10 neighbourhoods with residents who want to redesign their roads into being better places to live. Meanwhile, in Kent, the unprepossessing town of Ashford might soon become the biggest Shared Space scheme in the world.
Ashford is set to double in size in the next 30 years, with 31,000 new homes and 28,000 new jobs. As developments rise on its outskirts there are worries that its 1970s four-lane ring road will grow increasingly congested, making it untenable for cyclists and pedestrians and strangling life in the town’s historic centre. In a bid to head such problems off, the county authority is spending £11.3m to reduce a third of the 2km road to a two-way, slowed-down “quality street”, jointly designed by sculptors, artists and engineers.
RKL Consultants, which is handling the involvement of artists including John Atkin, Nayan Kulkarni and Simeon Nelson, envisages way-marking water channels, musical stepping-stones and south-facing terraces. “It will put Ashford on the map and I can see visitors coming from all over the world, like Drachten,” says Richard Stubbins, the Kent county councillor who has championed the scheme. Accidents are predicted to decline by 30 per cent after the makeover but he thinks the effect will be even more dramatic.
Hamilton-Baillie, who is advising on Ashford, also thinks it could be “a very important scheme”. “It’s on a scale for people to take notice and it tackles a general problem of 1960s ring roads [in] dozens of towns from Nottingham [in the UK] and Rotterdam [in the Netherlands] to many large French cities”.
The Shared Space and Home Zone philosophy is indeed a rejection of prevailing mid-20th century wisdom. The 1933 Athens charter, for example, said that residential, work, transport and recreation should never be mixed. By the 1950s, modernist ideas of the vertical city were being realised and public spaces began to deteriorate. Critics such as Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities, railed against what they saw as short-sighted planning.
But by the 1970s, in both cities and suburbs, especially in the US, Canada and the Middle East, “there was just a sea of asphalt and not a single reason for being out in the public realm”, Gehl says. He cites Miami, where street lights were removed “because everyone has head lights”. “It’s a spooky environment. Sometimes you can hear joggers panting in the dark.”
It was in the 1980s that mainstream attitudes began to change. “We started to gather in cities to meet with our fellow man again and develop our culture, rather than just to get from A to B, and there were attempts to turn this super-tanker around,” Gehl says.
Now the theories espoused by those pioneers have “generally become an established component in broader urban policies”. And, although momentum in northern Europe has died down, it seems to be gaining in other parts of the world.
Advocates have no doubts about why. “Predictions that vehicles are going to be part of our economic and social systems for some time mean we will need to find some better way of accommodating them in towns,” says Hamilton-Baillie. Concerns over health and depleting fossil fuels will also factor in, Gehl says. “More and more cities will compress themselves and try to organise themselves differently.”
A civilising influence
By Clare Dowdy
Published: April 20 2007 18:37 | Last updated: April 20 2007 18:37
Parents screaming at their children to get out of the way of speeding vehicles, cars parked all over the kerbs and neighbours barely on nodding terms. It’s a typical scenario in many of the world’s cities, suburbs and even small towns. But if an enlightened band of planning experts, traffic engineers and community activists has its way, it’s one that will soon be eradicated.
Take Mina Road in St Werburghs, Bristol, in the UK. The 45 families who live on it recently secured £12,500 to narrow the once busy road to a single running lane wide enough to let cars and bicycles pass safely, to introduce parallel parking and to install planters to distract drivers into slowing down.
Resident Simon Groves, who also happens to be a member of the local county council’s traffic management team, now describes his street as a little enclave. “It’s much more chilled out,” he says. “I know everyone by name and people are looking after the place.”
He isn’t sure whether the transform-ation has resulted in higher house prices but says the neighbourhood is now “desired by families with young kids because it’s a safe place to be”. Each planter has been adopted by a household; his only disappointment is that they haven’t been filled with shrubs big enough to hide the parked cars.
The efforts of the St Werburghs residents are a shining example of an urban planning philosophy – often labelled Home Zone or Shared Space – that has developed over the past three decades and promotes sensitive street design as a way to create more people-friendly environments.
“We should learn to build villages in the way they were built in the past,” says Hans Monderman, the Dutch engineer seen as the father of Shared Space. He is not advocating unpaved roads, horse-drawn transport and reinstating stocks – he just wants neighbourhoods that work for everyone, satisfying residents as well as moving traffic along. Cars, he argues, have been allowed to dominate residential areas, particularly in suburbs, for far too long, and quality of life has declined has a result.
The Home Zone approach tends to focus on a single residential street or neighbourhood. These zones are characterised by having no separate raised pavements but instead a variety of surface treatments: trees, planting and street furniture to define and screen car parking; bollards and street lighting to illuminate the space. “They look to extend the social domain by reducing the areas designed for traffic flow,” says British urban design consultant Ben Hamilton-Baillie. “There is a variety and richness of detail because each community has been involved. And for areas where people don’t have big gardens, they use the street for sitting and chatting.”
Shared Space typically involves larger-scale projects in which many roads in a city or town are stripped back to their bare minimum to inspire a more harmonious relationship between drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. Measures are sometimes counter-intuitive, making roads more confusing so that drivers are forced to slow down. In a typical scheme, out go the all the road signs, traffic lights, kerbs and zebra crossings and in come narrower streets and new paving. The resulting ambiguity encourages eye contact and integrates cars into a “social zone”.
The idea behind both strategies is the same, Monderman says. “Public space has always been the most important space in society” and traffic engineers must respect it. “We create context,” he explains. “When you want people to behave as if they are in a church, you have to build a church.” And when you want drivers to feel as if they are in a community, not just passing through it, roads must look like lanes, not thoroughfares.
Monderman has so far spearheaded more than 100 Shared Space schemes in the Dutch region of Friesland. In the village of Opeinde the division between road and pavement is now indistinguishable and road markings and signs have been removed. Traffic still flows – but at a leisurely pace of about 30km per hour – and the streets have been reclaimed by playing children, cyclists and barking dogs.
In Drachten, a town with 45,000 residents, junctions with traffic lights and roundabouts have also been rejected in favour of “squareabouts”, a Monderman signature feature in which cars flow through pedestrian squares. Owen Paterson, the UK Conservative party’s transport spokesman, visited the Laweiplein intersection earlier this year as research for a policy paper on roads and, even when he stood in the middle of traffic, did not elicit a single act of road rage. Some people shook their heads but not one person honked or gestured menacingly.
“Removing traffic lights leads to the perception of danger a little bit of risk should be part of life otherwise you get accidents,” says Monderman, who is now in his 60s. “That’s a difficult message. But when you give people responsibility and stop interfering, you can trust people. The cost is [also] lower because lights are expensive and you don’t have to change the system. It’s permanent.”
Since traffic lights were ditched at Laweiplein in 2003, the number of accidents has dropped and, as Paterson’s visit shows, it is now a mecca for engineers, planners and politicians. Results in the Swedish town of Norrköping, home to the country’s first Shared Space scheme, have also been encouraging, says Christer Hyden, professor of technology and society at Lund University. Studies show that “the average speed [is now] 13km an hour, which more or less guarantees that there will be no severe accidents,” he explains.
Larger communities have successfully used Shared Space principles to reclaim the public realm, too. These include the European cities of Copenhagen in Denmark, Barcelona in Spain, Lyon and Strasbourg in France and Freiburg in Germany; Portland, Oregon, in the US; Curitiba in Brazil; Córdoba in Argentina; and Melbourne in Australia.
[B]Jan Gehl, professor of urban design at the School of Architecture in Copenhagen, has orchestrated the Danish capital’s transformation, much of it focused on the humble bicycle. Cycle traffic lights are, for example, timed to turn green six seconds before those for cars. Most of the city’s four-lane roads are gone, reduced to two with a waiting lane for cyclists in the middle. And downtown street parking is being axed, with car parks created on the outskirts instead.
Thanks to these measures, Copen-hagen now has the lowest car use in any European city and 36 per cent of residents cycle, double the level of 10 years ago and six times higher than in London. “The more bikes there are, the safer it is to cycle because of the critical mass,” Gehl says. [Melbourne has also made great strides in traffic management, three years ago introducing new, wider pavements in local bluestone and better quality street furniture and lighting. More recently it installed Copenhagen-like cycle lanes. According to Gehl, there are now 40 per cent more people walking the city’s streets than a decade ago.
The trend doesn’t stop at developed western countries either. Gehl is also working in the Jordanian capital of Amman, which has “a very active and idealistic mayor” in Omar Al Ma’ani. “He is eager that the city shouldn’t develop into a big traffic jam like other Middle Eastern cities but many wealthy people are coming from Iraq in cars,” Gehl says. So “we are using the concept of pedestrian priority streets, including Home Zones.”
Hamilton-Baillie, who is also a consultant to UK conservation body English Heritage, thinks that these schemes serve to reintroduce civility into communities. “The whole system of conventional urban traffic planning is the systematic removal of civility,” he explains.
Gehl agrees. “In a traditional city public spaces were for meeting, marketing and moving. But in the past century the moving has taken over.”
Although northern Europe has led the way in the Home Zone and Shared Space movements, the latest spin-offs can be found in the UK. The busy shopping area of High Street Kensington in London has been refurbished to try to reduced traffic speeds, and Sustrans, the green transport charity, has launched a new project called DIY Streets and is on the hunt for 10 neighbourhoods with residents who want to redesign their roads into being better places to live. Meanwhile, in Kent, the unprepossessing town of Ashford might soon become the biggest Shared Space scheme in the world.
Ashford is set to double in size in the next 30 years, with 31,000 new homes and 28,000 new jobs. As developments rise on its outskirts there are worries that its 1970s four-lane ring road will grow increasingly congested, making it untenable for cyclists and pedestrians and strangling life in the town’s historic centre. In a bid to head such problems off, the county authority is spending £11.3m to reduce a third of the 2km road to a two-way, slowed-down “quality street”, jointly designed by sculptors, artists and engineers.
RKL Consultants, which is handling the involvement of artists including John Atkin, Nayan Kulkarni and Simeon Nelson, envisages way-marking water channels, musical stepping-stones and south-facing terraces. “It will put Ashford on the map and I can see visitors coming from all over the world, like Drachten,” says Richard Stubbins, the Kent county councillor who has championed the scheme. Accidents are predicted to decline by 30 per cent after the makeover but he thinks the effect will be even more dramatic.
Hamilton-Baillie, who is advising on Ashford, also thinks it could be “a very important scheme”. “It’s on a scale for people to take notice and it tackles a general problem of 1960s ring roads [in] dozens of towns from Nottingham [in the UK] and Rotterdam [in the Netherlands] to many large French cities”.
The Shared Space and Home Zone philosophy is indeed a rejection of prevailing mid-20th century wisdom. The 1933 Athens charter, for example, said that residential, work, transport and recreation should never be mixed. By the 1950s, modernist ideas of the vertical city were being realised and public spaces began to deteriorate. Critics such as Jane Jacobs, author of The Life and Death of Great American Cities, railed against what they saw as short-sighted planning.
But by the 1970s, in both cities and suburbs, especially in the US, Canada and the Middle East, “there was just a sea of asphalt and not a single reason for being out in the public realm”, Gehl says. He cites Miami, where street lights were removed “because everyone has head lights”. “It’s a spooky environment. Sometimes you can hear joggers panting in the dark.”
It was in the 1980s that mainstream attitudes began to change. “We started to gather in cities to meet with our fellow man again and develop our culture, rather than just to get from A to B, and there were attempts to turn this super-tanker around,” Gehl says.
Now the theories espoused by those pioneers have “generally become an established component in broader urban policies”. And, although momentum in northern Europe has died down, it seems to be gaining in other parts of the world.
Advocates have no doubts about why. “Predictions that vehicles are going to be part of our economic and social systems for some time mean we will need to find some better way of accommodating them in towns,” says Hamilton-Baillie. Concerns over health and depleting fossil fuels will also factor in, Gehl says. “More and more cities will compress themselves and try to organise themselves differently.”