The Street

A Quintessential Social Public Space

Vikas Mehta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135079888
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Received the Environmental Design Research Association's 2014 Place Book Award

Shortlisted for the UDG Francis Tibbalds Book Award 2014

Good cities are places of social encounter. Creating public spaces that encourage social behavior in our cities and neighborhoods is an important goal of city design. One of the cardinal roles of the street, as public space, is to provide a setting for sociability.

How do we make sociable streets? This book shows us how these ordinary public spaces can be planned and designed to become settings that support an array of social behaviors. Through carefully crafted research, The Street systematically examines people's actions and perceptions, develops a comprehensive typology of social behaviors on the neighborhood commercial street and provides a thorough inquiry into the social dimensions of streets.

Vikas Mehta shows that sociability is not a result of the physical environment alone, but is achieved by the relationships between the physical environment, the land uses, their management, and the places to which people assign special meanings.

Scholars and students of urban design, planning, architecture, geography and sociology will find the book a stimulating resource. The material is also directly applicable to practice and should be widely read by professional urban designers, planners, architects, and others involved in the design, planning, and implementation of commercial streets.

1

A Ubiquitous Urban Space for People

Think of a city and what comes to mind? Its streets. If a city's streets look interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.

—Jane Jacobs

The city is a unique human settlement. Not only because it is an expansive space with a collection of a large number of people and institutions; or because it is a complex physical construction with a network of infrastructural fields connecting destinations; or a setting that offers greater economic opportunities than all other forms of human settlement. The city is unique especially because it is a place of constant encounter. These encounters—the exchange of ideas and information— create innumerable possibilities to make innovation and growth possible. City life and urbanity are distinctive to human civilization because the agglomeration of a large number of heterogeneous people permits limitless permutations for exchanges and interactions, and this constantly creates new possibilities to advance culture. It is in the city, Mumford (1961) reminds us, that “the making and re making of selves” constantly occurs. “In any generation, each urban period provides a multitude of new roles and an equal diversity of new potentialities. These bring about corresponding changes in law, manners, moral evaluations, costume, and architecture” (p. 116). The city has these potentialities because the institutions and spaces of the city have the capability to be places of interaction and dialogue. Writing about the city in history, Mumford (1961) further suggests, “Perhaps the best definition of the city in its higher aspects is to say that it is a place designed to offer the widest facilities for significant conversation” (p. 116). In the city, this interaction and dialogue, this conversation, takes place in various forms in all aspects of everyday life—social, economic, and political. Although Lefebvre (1991) argues that all social experiences in the city are materialized and understood through space, urban sociologist Lyn Lofland specifically identifies the city as a space that “quite uniquely, provides a kind of socio-psychological environment that is not duplicated elsewhere” (1998, xi). The numerous kinds of social and spatial juxtapositions and the innumerable interactions between people of similar and different backgrounds and beliefs are possible only in the city. As diverse people with different perspectives interact and make exchanges in public space, they bring new needs and meanings, and thus possibilities, to reshape social space and social life creating even more diversity. Thus, when public space supports it, a healthy social life in cities is self-perpetuating. The variety and intensity of activities and the co-presence of a diversity of social groups and classes that generates myriad social experiences is what makes living in cities and the urban experience unique. This book is about these interactions and experiences—about the social encounters in the city.

Humans are social beings who receive fulfillment and enjoyment through interactions and contacts with others of their species. In sociological terms, our well-being depends on a range of primary to secondary relationships that generate an even greater range of very intimate to fleeting and routinized interactions and behaviors (Lofland, 1998). Social interactions—both active and passive—are a distinct, important, and meaningful part of the experience of living.

Social needs have an anthropological foundation. Opposed and complimentary, they include the need for security and opening, the need for certainty and adventure, that of organization of work and of play, the needs for the predictable and the unpredictable, of similarity and difference, of isolation and encounter, exchange and investments, of independence (even solitude) and communication, of immediate and long-term prospects. The human being has the need to accumulate energies and to spend them, even waste them in play. He has the need to see, to hear, to touch, to taste and the need to gather these perceptions in a ‘world’.

(Lefebvre, 1996, 147)

Social encounters have always been a significant part of the life of the city. In much of history, the city,

as a place of assembly, of social intercourse, of meeting, was taken for granted…. You might assemble in the Forum at Pompeii or round the market cross, but you still assembled; it was a ritual proper to man, both a rite and a right. Nor in the general way did you have to explain whether your motives were proper or profane. Men are gregarious and expected to meet.

(Cullen, 1961, 103)

Facilitating social encounters is considered a central role of the city. Mumford (1964) argues that the primary purpose of the city is “to permit—indeed, to encourage—the greatest possible number of meetings, encounters, challenges, between varied persons and groups, providing as it were a stage upon which the drama of social life may be enacted” (p. 117). But this exchange of ideas, information, goods and services, and social interactions flourishes when the city has a veritable network of public spaces as a shared resource beyond our private and parochial realms. The subject of this book is the range of interactions and behaviors that occur in the physical public space of the city. Although private, parochial, and now, more than ever before, the virtual realms support meaningful social exchanges, physical public space is key to making social interactions flourish: This is where people come face-to-face with each other and where the largest range of behaviors can be supported. In this book, I focus on the everyday social exchanges and interactions in one of the most universal public spaces of the city—its streets.

The Primacy of the Street

Most urbanites have childhood memories of streets—urban streets, suburban streets, public streets, private streets, streets to be on, and streets to stay away from. Streets form a basic unit of space in our experience of the city. It is no surprise that the street “has occupied a cherished place in the lexicon of urbanism” (Keith, 1995, 297). Streets hold a special place in the domain of public space and are both literally and metaphorically the most fitting symbol of the public realm. Jane Jacobs' words quoted at the opening of the chapter, however, are not merely metaphorical: In urban areas, streets constitute a significant part of the public open space—in some cases occupying over 50 percent of the urban land (Moudon, 1987). “[T]he ‘street’ is often shorthand for the urban world” (Jukes, 1990, xv). For many urbanites, the streets represent the outdoors (Jacobs, 1993). “Urban residents have had a stake in streets, relying on their presence to go about their daily lives” (Moudon, 1987, 13). People depend on streets for functional, social, and leisure activities, for travel, shopping, play, meeting, and interaction with other people, relaxation and even survival. And streets that cater to the daily functional, social, and leisure needs of people have been positively associated with economic growth, physical health, and a sense of community. Streets are a very significant part of the informal external public realm, “Accessible to all, these spaces constitute public space in its purest form” (Carmona et al., 2003, 111). The sociability of the city plays out in numerous spaces and the street is one of the most important spaces. Throughout history, no other spatial typology has fulfilled the role of public space better than the street. Furthermore, the discourse about the public realm or urban public space is often a discussion of the street. For example, the efforts to revitalize the public realm are often efforts to revitalize the streets—to generate activity and to make streets safe, desirable, and lively (see, for example, NMSC). By their ubiquity, streets demand attention even as policy makers, planners, and designers focus on other aspects of the public realm. In his extensive study of the sociability of plazas, the urban sociologist William Whyte (1980) pointed to the importance of the street for the life of the plaza:

Now we come to the key space for a plaza. It is not the plaza. It is the street. The other amenities we have been discussing are indeed important: sitting space, sun, trees, water, food. But they can be added. The relationship to the street is integral, and it is far and away the critical design factor.

(Whyte, 1980, 54)

A historical analysis reveals that streets, more than any other formal or spatial element, are the most ubiquitous organizers of settlement form, so much so that even our perception of city form in its most rudimentary classification as a planned versus a spontaneously developed construct is most importantly aided by the major street layout of the city. In developing an image of a city in their minds, people consider the linear paths, that are most often represented by streets, as one of the most important spatial elements of the environment (Lynch, 1960). Cities are, as the renowned architectural historian Spiro Kostof reminds us, “inhabited settings from which daily rituals—the mundane and the extraordinary, the random and the staged—derive their validity,” and the streets of the city are the settings par excellence where these rituals play out on an everyday basis. Kostof asserts, “The only legitimacy of the street is as public space. Without it, there is no city” (1992, 194). The street, more than any other space, represents the social life of the city: It is the quintessential social public space of the city.

Why Espouse the Street?

The street is an ancient spatial typology. It may seem old-fashioned to talk about streets in an era when new public spaces are being created and old typologies freshly interpreted. However, espousing and endorsing the street remains appropriate in the present time even when new forms and models of urbanization and development are being invented. Consider this. The street is the most ubiquitous form of open space across the urbanized world. Streets have a simple structure that can accommodate myriad functions. Streets continue to form an easy and efficient basis of dividing land, providing access and connectivity, light and air, utilities and services, and the morphology of the streets has the ability to be both an immediate and intimate public space for dwelling as well as a network of public spaces throughout the settlement that can link activities in both space and time (Moudon, 1987). Visualizing the street as a network of connected public open space translates into rethinking the political, social, economic, and environmental issues facing our cities. Consequently, addressing these issues on the street can be transformative for our cities. Most cities have some major streets that anchor significant civic, cultural and commercial buildings and spaces and, along with it, a host of historical memories of the city. Revitalizing such streets, as many cities have done, provides an easy way to restore image and identity to benefit the city and its people. Remaking some major neighborhood streets as main streets, to provide for daily shopping needs, can translate into creating walkable urban centers. Besides being easily accessible, the advantages of such an intervention are manifold. In a time when we are increasingly able to satisfy our needs for leisure and information in the private realm and when public space in cities is shrinking and transforming into a privatized pseudo-public realm as a result of fear (Ellin, 1999), the neighborhood commercial street provides an open neutral territory that is a key quality of public space (Tiesdell and Oc, 1998). Local main streets can be a boon to the local economy; they can reduce the dependence on the automobile, and having destinations in the neighborhood that can be reached on foot can provide health benefits. Above all, local main streets create opportunities for neighbors and strangers to meet and engage, provide opportunities for a range of social interactions as a part of the daily round, and possibly even reinforce a sense of community. There are other reasons to favor the street. As cities and urban regions look toward becoming more sustainable, the street offers easy possibilities to transform a substantial portion of the open space into green corridors and connectors of the natural ecology of the region. Not only can streets connect other natural open spaces of the city; streets can themselves be redesigned as green corridors that are conduits of nature. Such remade main streets and “green” streets can provide much-needed identity for neighborhoods. In addition, the resultant open space can be a step toward creating an equitable and healthy city by providing physical amenities for people of all economic classes. As Jane Jacobs suggests, the streets of a city are the barometers for the quality of public space of the city. Transforming streets for social, economic, and environmental gains is the most economic and realistic strategy, as streets already exist in most parts of urban settlements. Allan Jacobs is correct in suggesting that if “we do right by our streets we can in large measure do right by the city as a whole—and, therefore and most importantly, by its inhabitants” (Jacobs, 1993, 314).

Streets are particularly relevant in North American and other existing and developing modern cities, which, unlike most European, South American, and Asian medieval center-cities, have few or no squares or plazas designed specifically for casual stationary and social activities. In addition, while modern urban societies no longer depend upon the square or the plaza for basic needs, such as collecting water and gathering news, the street is a current and relevant behavior setting. Bernard Rudofsky, a great proponent of the street, observes, “If some day Americans should want to opt for a more dignified city life, the street will be first to come on the list of rehabilitation” (1969, 20–1).

What is the Street? Definitions, Images and Meanings

We talk of the street in everyday discourse. Of Main Street and Wall Street, of the word on the street but also of mean streets, of being streetwise and having street credibility and street smarts. “In the newspapers, streets are synonymous with the unruly aspects of urban scenes—street people, street gangs, demonstrations, and accidents. Yet, the press also reflects their positive associations with parades, sidewalk cafes, vendors, and outdoor performances. Celebrated in literature, music, and the movies [and I would add art], streets embody social life and its memories” (Moudon, 1987, 13). The street, for some, is a place of social ills and at the same time a place of public life, a space to get out and see others, and experience the city and urbanity.

The evocative power of the word “street” derives precisely from its vagueness. But whether used by fashion magazines or political journals, it always implies a common touch, a feeling of how everyday life is lived by most citizens, appealing to some demotic, sometimes democratic urge.

(Jukes, 1990, xiv)

Images and meanings of the street abound. In this section, I will present some of the important definitions and understandings of the street that have been constructed over recent times. At the end, I do not intend to come up with a uniform definition of the street that will be acceptable across disciplines. That would be a futile exercise. My purpose here is to survey the diverse readings of the street that encompass a range of images and meanings of this ubiquitous urban space.

Defining the Street

From a strictly morphological perspective, Rapoport defines the street as “the more or less narrow, linear space lined by buildings found in settlements and used for circulation and, sometimes, other activities” (1987, 81). Notice, in this definition of the street as a physical entity, the emphasis on circulation over other activities. However, even though circulation remains a primary purpose of the street, urban scholars and observers increasingly suggest thinking of the street as a social space rather than just a channel for movement. Some even argue that the social affordances offered by the presence of people in public spaces such as streets might be more important than the physical affordances that the environment offers. Jukes (1990) suggests a more sociological definition. The street is, he writes, “a central metropolitan thoroughfare, an arena where strangers encounter one another, come face to face with the size and heterogeneity of urban life” (p. xiv; emphasis in original). Capturing the common ideas inherent in the street since the Renaissance into seven elements, Gutman (1978) provides us with an extensive description of the street. Borrowing from Gutman, the street (1) is a social entity and its design reflects some social and cultural motives; (2) is three-dimensional such that the buildings containing and defining the street space are as important as the two-dimensional surface of the street; (3) provides a link between buildings but also provides a link between people and facilitates communication and interaction; (4) by and large, is accessible and public even though there have always existed some privatized streets; (5) has two parts, one for the movement of people and the other for animals and vehicles; (6) although a connector, is also a bounded space in and of itself; and (7) in scale, is an intermediate urban space between buildings and other larger spaces such as parks, gardens, plazas, squares, and the like. This is a comprehensive social and physical characterization but streets have several other images and meanings grounded in the political reading of the city. As Kostof so lucidly states,

But the fundamental reality of streets, as with all public space, is political. If the street was an invention, it set out to designate a public domain that would take precedence over individual rights, including the right to build what one wants where one wants and the right to treat the open space as one's front yard. The street, furthermore, structures community. It puts on display the workings of the city, and supplies a backdrop for its common rituals. Because this is so, the private buildings that enclose the street channel are perforce endowed with a public presence.

(Kostof, 1992, 194)

Over history, the street has been what Lefebvre calls the “representation of space” as well as the “space of representation.” Streets have been important spaces of the city. Autocrats and governments, policy makers and planners, designers and developers have all used the street as a space to re-envision and transform but also to control the city. “Whoever controls the street also conquers the masses, and whoever conquers the masses thereby conquers the state,” said Joseph Goebbels. At the same time, the streets of the city have also been the spaces that citizens have used to express their social and political beliefs, needs, and rights, as we have recently seen in the events in the Middle East and in the Occupy Wall Street protests in several cities in the United States. “Streets are the terrain of social encounters a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 A Ubiquitous Urban Space for People
• 2 The Street Evolving: A Brief Social History
• 3 Everyday Social Behavior as a Basis for Design
• 4 Three Streets
• 5 Sociable Streets: A Typology of Social Behaviors
• 6 Needs for Social Behavior on Streets
• 7 Making Sociable Streets: Guidelines and Application
• Appendices
• Notes
• References
• Index