Are Great Streets Born...or Made?

Much like the people who use them, streets develop personalities. While their earliest aspects are those designed by their creators, whether the meandering of cows (as has been claimed for parts of Boston), the ego-centric celebrations of men (the Avenue des Champs-Elysees in Paris), the need for easy access to real estate or the desire to move automobiles quickly and efficiently (like too many streets everywhere), streets are changed over their lifetimes, and several of ours, by users and uses the original designers never intended or foresaw.

Although traffic engineers see streets as conduits for the flow of motor vehicles and measure their performance in vehicle trips per hour or day, turning movements, sight distances (longer is "better") and other measurable performance standards, users have a very different relationship with streets. Planner and teacher Allan Jacobs, is his book Great Streets noted: "There is magic to great streets. We are attracted to the best of them not because we have to go there but because we want to be there...They are symbols of a community and of its history; they represent a public memory. They are places for escape and for romance, places to act and to dream. On a great street we are allowed to dream; to remember things that may never have happened and to look forward to things that, maybe, never will."

Our recent experiences encountering new streets, not just highways and arterial streets, but secondary roads and sub-division cul-de-sacs as well, shows that most new streets are designed as utilities based on standard highway details with the same lane width, grass verge and sidewalk configuration, with the same (or similar) trees every 20 feet or so. Because our streets are engineered as utilities they lack the magic that draws us to the streets and roads of older communities. Don't we go to London, at least in part, to shop Jermyn Street; to Venice to experience the spatial sequence of streets and plazas leading to the Piazza San Marco? Are not the streets of New York's Soho, Chinatown and Little Italy far more inviting that Columbus Circle or Avenue of the Americas?

American federal and state roadway improvement funding programs have been the largest single contributor to the standardization of roadway design; and the engineering disciplines required to design streets to published standards have resulted in a growth spurt in collegiate civil engineering programs. The result is that early engineering standards resulted in more engineers, which results in yet more engineering standards. Add the growth in the number of lawyers and design-negligence lawsuits resulting in a drive on the part of the engineers and owners of road systems (mostly cities and towns) to avoid potential liability for accidents or anti-social activity (read: crime).

Planners and architects have long sensed that the standards for roadway design were contributing to a sense of alienation from the street, but have felt powerless (or too oblivious to the importance of the street in their precious designs) to appeal the decisions of bureaucrats who, after all, often controlled either the purse-strings or the design approvals, or both.

Now comes a group of architects and planners who have gained influence among a few developers who have bought into the market-potential of the designers' vision of the traditional town center. While their version is, in truth, a caricature of a town center, more Disney than historic, it brings with it tools for street design that provide hope that streets might regain their ceremonial, social and political role. The New Urbanists have gained the ears of politicians, investors, potential residents and shop owners as well. The politicians, in particular, hope that these new planning models will help to reverse the long trend of suburbanization of living, working and shopping.

While much of the attention of the New Urbanists is aimed at planning new communities, the rebuilding of older communities can benefit from the application of New Urbanism principles. Clustering living, working and shopping activities provides opportunities for additional social interaction and reducing alienation. Drivers speeding through a retail strip area have no emotional relationship to the strip, nor do they have any allegiance beyond convenience to shopowners along their path. Shops come and go without notice, remembered (if at all), only for the discounted price of their products.

Older communities, or the imagined memory of them, are the stated model for the planning principles of the New Urbanists. A visit to communities like Rockport, Provincetown or Marblehead, Massachusetts, reveals the magnetism of old Yankee towns with narrow, contorted, multi-use streets. Not only are these communities tourist destinations, but they are real working communities. The congestion of the streets in their village centers acts as a shaping element of the spatial experience and encourages visitors to get out of their cars and walk, thereby enhancing the contact with shops and shoppers.

Other older communities, like Woodstock Vermont, have major regional highways running through the middle of their village centers, yet have found a way to survive this intrusion or even thrive because of it. A pedestrian can experience a unique sense of power simply by stepping off the curb in Woodstock and have a multi-ton logging truck stop dead in its path to allow the pedestrian to cross. Beware, though, cars with New York license plates.

Harvard Square, in Cambridge Massachusetts, is another model of the auto/pedestrian/shop/home relationship. Vehicular traffic has become so much a shaper of this teeming village center that when planners closed off parts of lower Brattle Street to create a "pedestrian precinct", sales dropped and shopowners revolted. This experience parallels that of other communities and evidences the relationship between the street as the artery of public life and successful, vibrant communities. This should not be surprising since streets have always served this purpose, the only alteration being that the internal combustion engine, with its predilection for greater speed, has replaced oxen and horses as the motor for transport.

The enclosure of drivers and passengers, to allow greater safety and comfort at highway speeds and enhanced security from crime, also contributes to alienation and raises the question of whether highway planning has contributed to the national sense of alienation or is a result of other factors that created alienation. You only have to observe the communities cited earlier to come to the conclusion that highway planning and its application to urban and suburban communities has been a prime culprit. None of the communities meets current roadway design standards.

Leadership in the revitalization of most of the older communities is severely lacking (paralleling the national experience) and the will to face the many owners of real estate and develop a consensus for revitalization simply does not exist in most communities. This is one of the major reasons that the influence of the New Urbanists is mostly limited to planning new communities. Unless the drive for traffic/community planning standards comes from premier political officers, the engineering standards and engineers will continue to prevail.


Morgan Hill is managing director of the Hill Center for Design and a long-time, though casual, member of the Nonsday Breakfast Group led by horticultural writer Amos Pettingill.

Recommended Reading

American Town Plans: A Comparative Time Line. Easterling, Keller. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.

The Anglo-American Suburb, (Architectural Design Profile 37), Vol. 51, No. 10/11. Stern, Robert A.M. and John M. Massengale. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981.

American Vitruvius: An Architect's Handbook of Civic Art. Hegemann and Peets. Princeton Architectural Press, 1989.

Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of America. Jackson, Kenneth. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design. Newman, Oscar. New York: Collier Books, 1972.

The Elusive City/. Barnett, Jonathon. New York: Icon, 1987.

The End of Equality. Kaus, Mickey. New York: Basic Books, 1995.

The Geography of Nowhere. Kunstler, James Howard. Touchstone Books, 1994.

The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You Through the Day. Oldenburg, Ray. New York: Marlowe and Co., 1997.

Leon Krier: Houses, Palaces, Cities. Krier, Leon. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985.

The Inner City: From Mud to Marble. Kohr, Leopold. International Specialized Book Service, 1989.

The Next American Metropolis. Calthorpe, Peter. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.

The New Corporate Frontier, The Big Move to Small Town U.S.A. Heenan, David A. New York: McGraw-Hill, Inc., 1991.

Penturbia: Where Real Estate Will Boom After The Crash of Suburbia. Lesinger, Jack. Seattle: Socio-Economics, 1991.

Rebuilding. Solomon, Daniel. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993.

Rediscovering the Center. Whyte, William. New York: Anchor Books, 1990.

Seaside: Making a Town in America. Mohney, David and Keller Easterling. Princeton Architectural Press, 1991.

Towns and Town-Making Principles. Duany, Andres and Plater-Zyberk, Elizabeth. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1991.

Town Planning in Practice. Unwin, Raymond. New York: Ayer Company Publications, 1969.

Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space. Sorkin, Michael. New York: The Noonday Press.

List compiled by DPZ Architects, Inc.