Our streets and squares make up what we call the public realm, which is the physical manifestation of the common good. When you degrade the public realm, the common good suffers.
—James Howard Kunstler
When we talk about the design of cities, people usually describe buildings. They describe famous historical landmarks built by people long ago or architectural wonders built with new age technology. They talk about how the city made them feel, and the memories that they made there, and fail to acknowledge or rather fail to recognize the fact that the streets in a city play an important role in their experience. The Streets make or break the experience of a person in the city. To make a good city, you need streets with an active life on them, you need good streets with a healthy environment for their users, and they need to be safe and comfortable while also being interesting.
Streets are the spaces between the buildings, and they are more than just carriageways taking people from one place to the other. They require the art of placemaking that make certain streets more unique and sought-after than the other. For example, ask a tourist in Paris about streets that make him feel unique and mesmerized and a majority of the people would say that the streets on the Eastern Bank of Paris are more beautiful as compared to other streets. People usually go with their memory of the street and how that area made them feel at a given point in time, while an Urban Designer or an Architect would notice details on the streets that make him feel that way. He will notice the boulevard of trees that have a beautiful shadow and light effect in the afternoon or the design of street lamps or benches which give that street its antique European feel.
Ask an urban designer or an architect about the streets he likes or dislikes, and he will start to give you a list of streets along with a list of patterns of buildings, trees, streetscape elements, or comfortable spots that make those streets work or not work. He will give you a street and tell you what makes them unique in their way. He will describe the streets of Chickpet with an air of nostalgia and romanticize the chaos of the market space, and tell you that it is a shame that the modernization and car-centric approach of today are tainting the history of what the area used to be.
Importance of Streets in a city
Streets form an important part of our everyday lives, they reflect the image of a community space, especially in India, the streets take on a very colorful life with the changing seasons and times. People tend to use them for celebrating festivals, conducting permanent business, hosting temporary exhibitions, and whatnot. Here they have a chaotic and lively character of their own. Unfortunately, as an urban designers, we tend to see the streets of today being taken over by automobiles, which have continued to push everything but the driver and the car to the sides of the road. This car-centric approach to cities has changed the character of a street and has given the main focus to automobiles zipping fast from one location to the other, not giving the common man a chance to observe the city that he’s traversing through.
Well-meaning authorities on seeing the growing population have designed wider roads to accommodate the people, and the common man has demanded this infrastructure advancement in a city too, where he wants a wider road so he can commute fast and save up on time, but in this process, they have removed “obstacles” like pedestrians, vendors, hawkers, trees which were getting in the way of these automobiles. They did not stop to think about the impact that this would have on the street life of a place and in turn on the life of a community here either. They do not stop to think that this would kill the character of the place and that it tends to robotize a city, with machines carrying people zipping past at high speeds.
Streets are the essence of a city, they add character, they add life, and they add color to a city. Today, however, with the changing times, and the increasing sense of nostalgia, the importance of street life is being recognized by the people. They are re-discovering and rebuilding the streets, trying to curtail the influence that cars have had on our cities. Today, a new vision for the street is the “Complete Street”- where the pedestrian, the cyclist, the driver, the vendors/hawkers, and the transit users all have a say in.
A person would describe a city as good if it has a massive urban infrastructure, to facilitate fast movement, while a Designer would describe a city as good if its streets are lively, colorful, and chaotic in the best sense, accommodating all and not just the car. A user may want such facilities, yet ask him which city has the best streets and he would make a list of cities that are designed without any such infrastructure.
Visit the best streets in the world, and you will observe that they have none of the modern urban elements like plastic white bollards, bright yellow pedestrian crossings, or huge cyclist lane symbols. What they have is harmony and character that has evolved with the time and history of the place. Streets matter and as designers, it is our responsibility to understand the patterns that human beings display, of calling certain streets beautiful and certain others, not and to design them in with an all-inclusive approach, all the while keeping the character of the city intact.
Let us take the responsibility to keep the streets yet alive with life and keep the character intact! Let the streets continue to tell their story, growing and changing with time, but always being a vibrant chaotic public space for all.
