Why are great streets so hard to build?
Charlottesville, Virginia's downtown mall. (Bob Mical / Flickr)
Bees are smart. When they build honeycombs, they simultaneously create storage vessels for honey and nests to live in.
The best traditional urban design from around the world also works this way. Most main streets built before the 1950s had shops to sell goods, homes for living in, and offices to work in. At the same time, they fit together to create something bigger: a great place for people to enjoy life together outside. The main street in Charlottesville, Virginia (shown above) offers an excellent example.
Sadly, humans are no longer as smart as bees. We still build shops and offices, but when we put them together, they rarely add up to a good place. Many urban areas are now defined by empty grass and asphalt. They discourage people from walking or socializing, with terrible consequences for sustainability, health, and happiness.
Boulevard Taschereau, Montréal, the inspiration for the song “Sprawl II” by Arcade Fire. (Google Street View)
What changed? One problem is that it is far too common for decision makers to assume that people-friendly design is someone else’s job—or to assume that it doesn’t matter at all. In this article, we offer concrete steps to clarify which specific responsibilities each of these actors should have to create people-friendly streets.
People-friendly design is not a nice-to-have
Decision makers in Canada and the United States often focus on the primary purpose of any project, and dismiss anything else as optional. The primary purpose of a hospital, for example, is to treat patients, not to create great streets. A new hospital in my city, Halifax, will soon impose industrial-style blank walls, setbacks, and parking garages in the middle of the downtown, because walkability is not its job. Similarly, a university in downtown Halifax recently erected two buildings that impose blank walls on the street, because the university’s job is educating students, not making the city feel nice outside.
Utilities often impede sidewalks with poorly placed grey boxes, because street life is not their mandate. Engineering departments often assume their job is to move cars at high speeds—not to create vibrant streets—and they therefore implement wide, fast roads that feel dangerous and alienating.
Spryfield, Nova Scotia. (Google Street View)
One solution would be to task an urban design department with making streets people-friendly. But here’s the rub: Once the world outside is lined with blank walls, parking lots, and retaining walls, the horse has left the barn. It is very challenging to salvage any kind of desirable place once it looks like an industrial park.
Coda Building, Atlanta, Georgia. (Darin Givens on Twitter)
Urban designers are often left with a tiny sliver of sidewalk between all the blank walls, unused setbacks, and highway-like roads. There is not much they can do with these unwelcoming spaces.
Making good design everyone’s job
To create great streets, cities face a difficult task to convince engineers, utilities, universities, health departments—and everyone else who shapes streets and buildings—that it is in fact their job to create a high-quality public realm.
At Happy Cities, we are optimistic it is possible for two reasons. First, there used to be a widespread expectation to build streets that people love—at a human scale with people-friendly buildings—as seen in Charlottesville. And second, our society already takes this kind of comprehensive approach when it comes to other issues, such as physical safety.
Today, a person can walk into any building without worrying it will collapse. This is possible because anyone with authority over any aspect of design and construction is required to ensure that their actions support structural integrity. Similarly, everyone has a responsibility to ensure buildings do not randomly catch on fire, electrocute people, or cause someone to fall to their death.
Imagine if most people had no responsibility for physical safety, and only some people paid attention to the issue some of the time. Life would be like a deadly obstacle course, requiring attention at all times to avoid electrocution, falls, and stab wounds.
Yet, almost no one has explicit responsibility for people-friendly design. It should be no surprise that our streets are uninviting and unsafe for people.
We need rigorous responsibility for creating people-friendly streets if we want great cities. Note “rigorous responsibility” is not “shared responsibility.” We do not need a set of vague, common goals and targets. We need specific responsibilities, assigned to each department, profession, and individual who have any authority over any element of the street. In this way, we can ensure that our collective efforts will, together, add up to a world outside worth living in.
The essential ingredients
How can we establish such a widespread sense of responsibility?
To start, we need to define what people-friendly design requires. We offer the following simplified list, based on common themes in the research:
Street wall: Buildings need to align with each other to create a well-defined edge to the street and to provide a strong sense of place.
People-friendly architecture: Buildings need to contain ample visual detail—at small and large scales, and in three dimensions—so that they provide a desirable backdrop for the street in all directions.
Safe, comfortable streets: Car lanes should be as narrow as possible, and traffic must be slow by design. Streets should also contain seating, ample greenery, and protection from the elements. And they should be safe and accessible for people of all ages and abilities.
Street-facing buildings: Buildings must direct their entrances to the street to create a desirable street wall, and so that each person travelling to or from any building contributes to streetlife.
Small blocks: Blocks must be small to minimize walking distance from one intersection to the next. A good way to measure this is called “block section,” the distance between the farthest ends of a block’s perimeter. Block sections should be no longer than roughly 250 metres.
Mixed-use density: Regulations must enable buildings with multiple uses and functions, and a density of at least 35 people and jobs per acre (preferably more), so that people have destinations they can walk to.
Professional planning, engineering, and architectural organizations can play an important role by officially defining the ingredients that a good street requires.
None of these essential ingredients are particularly complex, but if you put them all together consistently, it is possible to create amazing places.
Park City, Utah. (Olivia Hutcherson / Unsplash)
How to get there
With this list in hand, we recommend the following three steps to assign responsibility for people-friendly street design:
Map out everyone who has authority over anything that affects the list of essential ingredients for people-friendly street design, such as:
Municipal departments, including planning, public works, and transit
Utilities, including water and electricity
Any government or quasi-governmental entity that designs buildings, including schools, hospitals, and universities
Developers and other private-sector builders
Architects, and anyone with a role in designing buildings
Write out the responsibilities of all these actors to implement the essential ingredients
Identify incentives or other tools to ensure people meet these responsibilities
This analysis makes it possible to define the role of every public sector actor to creating great streets, and to better regulate the private sector to achieve this goal.
Any government can conduct the analysis described in Step 1 and start to assign these responsibilities, even if they do not have authority over all actors. If a municipality did this just for its own departments, it would already make a major difference.
If people-friendly design is explicitly added to people’s job descriptions, it gives them good reason to learn everything they need to understand to deliver good design. Once this happens, building great streets can become the default—not a rare exception.
