Streets and the Shaping
               of Towns and Cities

People traditionally have used streets for transportation, public gathering spots, playgrounds, settings for weddings and funerals, etc. But in a modern suburban city, streets are generally full of cars and empty of people, with the exception of the annual parade or street dance. What happened?                                   

Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities (McGraw-Hill, 1997) explains the evolution of the humble and often-overlooked residential street and how it can be designed to accommodate both practical and social needs. This book should be of interest to neighborhood activists, developers, investors, planners, elected officials and anyone else interested in creating better places to live.

The 184-page book shows how modern cul-de-sacs and winding residential streets evolved from 19th-century commuter rail suburbs, and these from ancient Roman roads. The book discusses how government policies favoring rail expansion delayed road development in the United States and how official policies changed when cars started becoming widespread in the 1910s. In the following decades, traffic engineering emerged as a major influence in urban planning. This brought wide streets with gentle curves and did away with the traditional pedestrian comforts such as the strip of grass between the sidewalk and curb, or, sometimes, the entire sidewalk. The goal was to allow more cars to move at higher speeds and this approach has worked so well, beleaguered neighbors worldwide frequently pack city council meetings to complain about it.

This well-illustrated book is at its best when it discusses modern residential roads used in different nations. The prime example is the woonerf, Dutch for "people street." In a woonerf, traffic-calming devices have taken over the street, but in a much more refined way than simple speed humps and sidewalk bulb-outs. Planters, fountains, parked cars and benches jut out into a woonerf, which may be paved with textured bricks or cobblestones. Cars may pass, but it's an intimidating environment and they mind their manners by taking a weaving course around the obstacles. The extensive social infrastructure of planters and benches provides safe places for adults to meet and children to play and effectively blurs the lines between porch, sidewalk, courtyard and street. They are all the same.

The book also explains ways of blending pedestrian and bicycle-friendly design into modern subdivisions, which are notorious for dead-ends, long blocks, winding streets and few connections to surrounding subdivisions or shopping centers. One method widely used in Boise's suburban Columbia Village, for example, is to build a secondary pathway system between and behind homes. This would allow non-motorists to go from the end of one cul-de-sac to another, or to walk to an adjacent shopping center.

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The authors of Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities are Michael Southworth, a planning professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and Eran Ben-Joseph, a planning professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.