Decoding the term ‘Streets’
- Azbah Ansari
- Oct 2, 2020
- 5 min read
Make room for what you want to see more and let it flow….
When I ask you to define street or street life, which street comes to your mind? What do you recall instantly? Is it the photo walk or daily routine experiences or spontaneous interactions among people in walled city? Or is it rushing from one end of the road to another, or maybe just you assuming to reach the other end while stuck in traffic? Or is it some bad memory related to harassment or verbal abuse as you walked through a street/ sidewalk? Or is it a haunting memory of you being alone on a road with nobody for surveillance or secure feeling? Just like how I switched between the terms streets and roads, that’s how literally the switch happens in our brain and thus our sense of belonging or feeling safe.
In 20th century, when the human space was given to cars, there was no priority given to create spaces outside of cars hospitable to humans anymore. A car’s interior is designed for human comfort but not the street. Similarly, as houses got bigger, private spaces within homes became priority and the spaces outside homes were not considered important for human scale design. So you started using cars to get from one place to another more frequently as you felt safe in there rather than outside.
Jan Gehl and his team has been discussing today’s urban design and planning from an interesting perspective that states: spaces are being designed to look from aerial view, from plane. It looks good from above but not at human eye level. In any aesthetic context, the design of any street should be built to look good to someone standing at street level, not sitting on plane miles above it. We all know what is happening and we all can relate to it clearly. Fun fact: The cars seem foreign in a narrow street and humans seem foreign in a wide street.
Let’s compare the streets built before cars to today’s roads and see what influence do they have on us and our sense of belonging and safety.
The traditional streets of walled city and similar areas were designed for humans are a treat for human sight when experienced at human scale. It offers so much in an instant, a street where all of your senses are activated and you feel safe within yourself. It brings you back into consciousness. There, you can see two building edges – shops at ground level with human interactions as business propels and housing at upper level with jharokas or terraces for human interactions, sitting, or else hanging up clothes for drying. Everything is visible to human eye.
These bustling streets lined with multi-purpose edges making it a multi-purpose neighborhood, where edges are lined with tharaas/ benches for sitting, food or conversation purposes, noise of different vendors selling different products, vehicles passing by at a speed allowed by pedestrians walking in the neighborhood and doing routine activity, shopping etc. A busy lively street that keeps community together and offers natural surveillance to its users. This kind of street in traditional settlements has its own definition due to presence of elements added by its users as per their needs.
Then we have modern societies and neighborhoods, where a street is constituted of right of way including roadbed (size depending upon the image the society owner wants to convey – the bigger the better they think) and planting beds/ lawns that define the road edges and provides safe entrance/ exit to houses (for cars of course) and building edges that hardly offers any comfort to street or humans at street level. These kind of neighborhoods seems to be designed to keep privacy not only within homes but outside as well. The inhospitable neighborhoods we say and the reason being single-use planning. Even though we can still find some hospitable people creating welcoming environment outside their homes by providing street furniture and better interacting or aesthetically comforting facades and also by hosting street activities occasionally – making the street worthy of experience for a while due to human interaction and human presence.
Ever wondered why such neighborhoods are not safe for children? (if there are no guards) It is because they lack natural surveillance, they lack facilities for old age people to spend time outside and keep an eye on children, while fathers are busy at offices and mothers busy at home chores. Also, it lacks sense of community and thus lack sense of responsibility of one neighbor towards another. Thus, community shops offers a little breathable space and pleasing lively space for whole neighborhood as it offers a spot to gather and interact for all age groups.
Now coming to a multi-use area, where car- centric approach has been implemented and the whole idea of street gets confused with a road design that damages the human usage of space (a matter of human rights abolition) First of all to mention, the car- centric planners have entirely forgotten the purpose a place is serving, their main focus is to get the car from one end of a road to another regardless of the happening in the context where the car is going to travel in.
A good street is comprised of these components: right of way, sidewalk, road bed, transit facilities, service infrastructure, street activity, street furniture, building edges, travel lanes, ancillary lanes, cycle facilities and planting. But have we ever considered these all while designing any street, do we see any street being built while observing all of these elements with its proper share? No, we only see the entire focus on road bed, built only for cars, where sidewalks are just a buffer zone to separate road from building edges; where building edges are designed to keep users focus inside, for who would want to feel intimidation from passing cars; and the planting beds are there for aesthetic purposes (no where aesthetically pleasing at all, just ticking off the checklist with provision) serving merely as buffer zone.
These street components and their definitions can be found on the Global Designing Cities Initiative website. Their books are studied in Universities and kept in libraries but we hardly see these principles implementation because they belong to different fields of expertise and require a collaborative design and policies, but we never do that. The single minded companies provide facilities which serve a very shallow purpose, indeed. This kind of planning results into fear and overwhelm for a human being on a human scale usage. Thus, we see no vibrancy or safe vibe on the streets. And this is the first step to destroying basic human rights as citizens to walk freely on the streets within the city and leads to increased crimes and violence towards each other.
Car-centric planning has encouraged sprawling development and adverse human health conditions such as asthma, obesity and mental health issues. By failing to take into consideration the character of communities or the needs of an entire spectrum of users (including bicyclists, pedestrians, and neighbors such as residents and local businesses) this capital-intensive approach has missed the opportunity to use transportation design to shape communities, and not just connect them. (Project for Public Spaces)
A placemaking initiative known as Streets as Places movement seeks to engage citizens, policy makers and the transportation industry at large scale to reshape the planning and design of transportation networks and streets to promote and support economic vitality, civic engagement, human health and environmental sustainability while meeting people’s mobility needs. And for this movement to flourish we must break free from the single-minded approach of street design that focuses on efficient and safe movement of vehicles, ignoring human beings (especially slow travelers like pedestrians, cyclists, wheel chair users) and also do not address the resulting congestion and cost. We need to bring different areas of expertise together to work on one project in order to cater diverse problems associated with diverse user groups.
Join us to work together on this global movement for community well-being!
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