What makes a “Great Street”?

My latest purchase from Amazon.com is a book by Allan B. Jacobs, called Great Streets. The book looks at a wide variety of different streets around the world, from great boulevards to tiny cul-de-sacs, and analyses exactly what seems to make some of them “work”, and others not. Further to that, he looks what what makes some of these streets truly great.

Here’s the book’s cover:Perhaps one of the most interesting parts of the book (which I am only partway through so far) is the criteria that Allan Jacobs puts together for determining what makes a great street. It’s worth quoting:

First and foremost, a great street should help make a community: should facilitate people acting and interacting to achieve in concert what they might achieve alone. Accordingly, streets that are accessible to all, easy to find and easy to get to, would be better than those that are not. The best streets will be those where it is possible to see other people and to meet them; all kinds of people, not just of one class or colour or age. The criterion would work at many geographic scales, from citywide to neighbourhood, which open the possibility of types of great streets. Great neighbourhood streets would be the foci for people of a smaller geographic area than of a city, conceivably an area as small as the street itself. A great street should be a most desirable place to be, to spend time, to live, to play, to work, at the same time that it markedly contributes to what a city should be. Street are settings for activities that bring people together.

A great street is physically comfortable and safe. A great street might be cooler, more shady than another street on a hot summer day and therefore more pleasant to be on. There would be no sudden, unexpected gusts of wind off buildings. If there are many people there should not be so many as to make it difficult or uncomfortable to walk; it should not provoke a sense of confinement. Physical safety is another matter, and it can mean many things: but the general concern is relatively straightforward. One shouldn’t have to worry about being hit by a car or truck or about tripping on the pavement or about some other physical thing built into the street being unsafe…

…The best streets encourage participation. People stop to talk or maybe they sit and watch, as passive participants, taking in what the street has to offer. Demonstrations are possible. For over 15 years on the main street of Curitiba, Brazil, a long. long strip of paper has been paid on the pavement every Saturday morning, held down by wooden sticks every metre or so, thereby creating hundreds of individual white paper surfaces. Children that come are offered a brush and paint, and they do pictures as parents and friends watch. Social or economic status is not a requirement for joining in, only desire. Participation in the life of a street involves the ability of people who occupy buildings (including houses and stores) to add something to the street, individually or collectively, to be part of it. That contribution can take the form of sign or flower or awnings or colour, or in altering the buildings themselves. Responsibility, including maintenance, comes with participation.

The best streets are those than can be remembered. They leave strong, long-continuing positive impressions. Thinking of a city, including one’s own, one might well think of a particular street and have a desire to be there, such a street is memorable.

What I find great about this passage is that it recognises and highlights the need for streets to be considered as places in their own right, not just corridors to get from A to B. Unfortunately in Auckland we tend to give very little priority to viewing our streets as places, even in the case of what should be Auckland’s very own “great street”: Queen Street. Queen Street has a lot going for it, but at least in my view just fails to reach the heights of being a great street – largely because there’s a four-lane highway down the middle of it.

Creating great streets is clearly something that sits right at the intersection of land-use planning and transportation planning. We are effectively designing the street, which is in the transportation corridor, but we are designing them not just with the movement of people and vehicles through them in mind, but also in such a way that can make them great places in and of themselves. Because, after all most public space in a city is comprised of the street.

Which leads me to the question of who, in the new Auckland Super City structure, would be in charge of helping to create “great streets”? The Transport CCO, which is simply required to focus on transporting people around the city and is unlikely to employ an urban designer; or the Auckland Council who might have urban designers coming out of their ears – but won’t have the legal power to do anything within the street area? Yet again we see reasons to not split off transport matters from land-use planning.

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