Living Streets: Strategies for Crafting Public Space [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Living Streets is a long overdue comprehensive look at living strategies, planning ideas and technologies that are being applied to streets around the world in communities of all scales. Our right-of-ways comprise about one-third of our cities - and they have all too often been left to the design purview of transportation engineers, who, since the 1950's have been trained to design for a 4,000 lb piece of metal hurtling forward at an average 40 mph. Finally, this book provides clear, well documented strategies for planners and citizens everywhere to understand, and advocate for common sense alternatives.

In the history of cities and civilizations, "street" and "place" are almost synonymous. Resident or visitor, the name and the character of the street you're on says you are somewhere -- or not. And there's a lot at stake: quality of life, property values, attractive neighborhoods and the health and prosperity of whole cities.
Living Streets is hugely important and timely book about how to make streets into recognizable and pleasant places. It's useful to anyone wanting to create or share a vision for improving a street--planners and policy-makers, activists, urban designers and property owners interested in improving their neighborhood.
The first step to good streets is recognition that there are many more claims on the right-of-way than there is space to fill them. But there is little public understanding of the claims for other functions or competing uses on streets. Living Streets is a tool for negotiation -- and transformation.
Late 20th century development in American cities effectively shuns people on foot or on two wheels in the public right-of-way. In competing with other claims, vehicular traffic has an unfair advantage because in the numerical standards and formulas for traffic capacity and level of service, the only thing that counts is speed. The fewer cars, the faster they can move, and the higher the "level of service."
But what really counts for pedestrians is almost the opposite. The more of them on a street, the safer and more attractive it is for other pedestrians. To be really alive, streets favor complexity over simplicity in design. Combining uses wins over strict separation. Above all, qualitative features must be emphasized as much as quantitative formulas. That's what Living Streets does.
It outlines three overarching goals for city streets. They are: mobility (defined much more broadly, to include modes like bicycling and walking as well as motor vehicles); place making (all the elements, from art-work to the perception of safety, that make streets attractive and memorable); and natural systems (new ways of integrating plantings and storm water management for environmental benefit and enjoyment) True to its authors' roots in the Pacific Northwest, Living Streets blends environmentalism with urbanism.
We know that banishing cars -- and creating pedestrian malls -- can result in great pedestrian environments. But it is rarely the right solution for blighted streets or an abandoned Main Street in the US. It was widely tried in the 1960s and 70s, as the book recounts. Some of these decisions were reversed, because without traffic passing right by their doors, small retail business withered. There just weren't enough pedestrians living in the vicinity to populate the streets.
The ideas in Living Streets are flexible enough to apply incrementally as well as broadly. There will never be a perfect mathematical equation or a "one-size-fits all" approach for any right-of-way, and this book does not provide one. For instance, parking -- and ways to include it in the mix of uses -- is discussed. But you can't use the book to determine exactly how much there should be, and where. Every street is part of a larger network, one in which the distribution of uses, and the character, evolves over time in response to laws, standards, design and investment.
Paving the way for lots of pedestrians works better in cities that have already learned how to do mixed-use zoning well, and are well on their way to achieving an 18-hour community in some neighborhoods. By outlining the important elements in any urban street, Living Streets should jump-start the entire process of revitalization and urbanization.