the street – the connective
tissue of democratic space
and visual experience that structures towns and cities.
But ironically we have little opportunity to celebrate
this consensus. No sooner have we reached some pro-
fessional agreement about the appropriateness of tra-
ditional urban spaces than other critics raise new
doubts about the authenticity of our revived streets
and public spaces (Sandercock, 1999). Are they not,
these critics argue, just locations for a passive ‘café
society,’ developer-driven stage sets for consumption
from generic
retailers like Starbucks, The Gap, and
Victoria’s Secret rather than places for active citizen-
ship and democratic engagement? Are these priva-
tized realms masquerading as public spaces? In
America additional voices are raised asking if these
new streets and squares are simply exclusive settings
for the white middle class, places from which poorer
black and Hispanic populations are excluded by
income level if not by social policy. These are some of
the arguments we examine in the next section.
THE STREET AND ‘CAFÉ SOCIETY’
We have seen in the earlier
chapters on the history of
city design how the objectives of urban design in the
twentieth century have swung back and forth like a
pendulum. Beginning with the street as the basic
building block of urbanism at the start of the century,
professional opinion has arced across to the other
extreme where the development of open, continuous,
modernist space marked the ‘death of the street’ in
the decades just before and after World War II. Most
recently as the century drew to a close,
design theory
and practice have returned to the street as the arma-
ture of contemporary, sustainable urbanism. Once
again, buildings are seen today as edges to public
space, defining ‘urban rooms,’ rather than objects
adrift in open space. In Britain, this latter return to
traditional urbanism was exemplified by texts such as
Responsive Environments
(Bentley et al., 1985) which
still acts as an effective primer
for students and prac-
titioners alike. In America, Peter Calthorpe’s
The
Next American Metropolis
(1993) provided a similarly
useful text at a more general level of consideration.
The urban wisdom contained within these and
other publications has become enshrined in British
government policy guidance notes such as
By Design:
Urban Design in the Planning System: Towards Better
Practice
(2000), and
By Design: Better Places to Live
(2001). In America traditional urban design princi-
ples have, as we noted in Chapter 3, been best articu-
lated in the
Charter for the New Urbanism
(1998) and
in publications
by the Urban Land Institute, such as
Chuck Bohl’s
Placemaking: Developing Town Centers.
Main Streets and Urban Villages
(2002). The differ-
ences between British and American policies about
planning and urban design are examined more
closely in Chapter 5, but suffice it here to say that
while many design and planning objectives are similar
on both sides of the Atlantic,
in Britain they tend to
be embedded within government policy (however
flawed in application) while in America, there is a
large void at the national level. Any push for good
urban design is usually a function of independent pro-
fessionals and pressure groups outside government.
With the help of an increasing number of texts
and guidance manuals, designers in Britain and
America have come to use street-oriented approaches
to solve contemporary
urban design and town plan-
ning problems, either retrofitting older commercial
centers and corridors to become pedestrian-friendly,
or by creating whole new walkable neighborhoods on
greenfield sites. The dramatic increase in urban living
in America has placed new demands on the public
spaces of cities. Even transportation engineers now
realize the function of a city street, for example, is no
longer simply to move traffic.
It is expected to be a
place that can support several activities, movement
CHAPTER FOUR
●
SOURCES OF GOOD URBANISM
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