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Learning Point 99Streets, Networks and Public Space

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INTRODUCTION

WHAT ARE LEARNING POINTS?

Learning points share what people have learned from their experience in regeneration - from people working or talking together, or from research into issues and evaluation of what is happening. Learning points can help people and organisations to improve their practice through identifying what works and what doesn’t.The views described in learning points do not mean that the Scottish Centre for Regeneration (SCR) or the Scottish Government necessarily support them. They simply reflect what has been debated and what those involved in the event considered useful learning and lessons from their perspectives.WHAT IS THIS LEARNING POINT ABOUT?

This Learning Point captures the key points from the presentation given at the Design Skills Symposium in Stirling on 28 September 2011 by Ben Hamilton-Baillie. Ben Hamilton-Baillie is an architect, urban designer and movement specialist and Director of Ben Hamilton-Baillie Associates.

Image: Reclaiming public spaces - the red carpet ‘Stadlounge’ (‘City Lounge’) in St Gallen. Switzerland.Shared space is an urban design concept aimed at integrating motor vehicles, pedestrians and other road users into ‘people oriented’ public spaces

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INTRODUCTION

With greater personal mobility and increased opportunities to shop, meet and access cultural experiences at home through TV, on-line, and via other media, and in out of town shopping or entertainment ‘centres’, our urban centres will continue to decline unless we make them places where people want to be. This means that we have to think of what kind of an experience people want from their towns, and know how we can provide this. A key aspect of this is re-designing our streets as lively and attractive urban space for all users instead of as traffic routes. For the first time in the UK in nearly 50 years there are Government policies that promote streets as places for all users, and we are beginning to see examples of schemes where streets have been successfully re-modelled as attractive public places, which are also economically more successful.

1. THE CHALLENGE - Making our town centres places people want to be in

Region Whole settlement District

Block / Street Plot

Image: A shared space vision for Hereford, England.Scotland’s towns are no longer used in the way they were in the past; re-designing them as accessible, attractive spaces is key to their long-term sustainability

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2. BACKGROUND: How do we currently manage our streets?

The separation of traffic and pedestrians was enshrined in the 1963 Buchanan report ‘Traffic in Towns’ which stated that ‘people and traffic were fundamentally incompatible’, an approach inherited from the modernist attempt to rationalise and order the behaviour of people in cities. This approach led to urban centres being designed or re-modelled to segregate cars from pedestrians. New places were often designed with cars and people on different levels; segregation in existing centres took the

form of the creation of pedestrian precincts, and the installation of increasing numbers of guard-rails, lights, bollards and signage mostly to keep cars and pedestrians apart. As volumes of traffic increased, so did the volume of this signage and street ‘clutter’. With most of this directed at road users, the message to pedestrians was that these places were not for them. Road safety campaigns to pedestrians which carried messages such as ‘One false move and you are dead’ (1982) confirmed that the territory beyond

Image (top right): 1982 Road safety campaign advertisement; (bottom left): Our town centres have become ‘cluttered’ with street furniture and signage designed to segregate pededestrian and motorist.

the kerb was someone else’s. This approach was enshrined in the different government departments who had separate responsibilities for the different territories of building, pavement, road and trees. But while traffic can be controlled, the nature of public ‘foot-use’ of a space is that it is unpredictable and irregular, and public space should be designed to be able to support this irrationality and irregularity. Rather than being corralled by rules and guard-rails we are being invited to re-discover principles of civility, and to adapt our behaviour more closely in response to each other.

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Underlining much of the work of Ben Hamilton-Baillie and of the examples he showed is one basic principle – take a holistic approach to the whole of a street (including buildings, pavement and roadways) as one urban space, and design it for all users. This involves a complementary understanding that there are many clients for public space, institutions and individuals. De-pending on the nature and/or location of the street, ‘foot-users’ might need to be considered as having more value as ‘car-users’. A key part of this approach to a unified space is a new un-derstanding of the relationship between people on foot and people in vehicles, in which, instead of them being separated, both sets of users are invited to pay more attention to each other and to the realities of their surroundings.

This attitude underlines the concept of ‘shared space’ which was a feature of most of the ex-amples cited by Hamilton-Baillie, who used the image of the skating rink as a place where the successful practice of the activity (skating) was dependent on the protocol of all the users of that space looking out for each other; this behav-iour in itself generated an important aspect of the very pleasure of the activity. Shared space, where the barriers between pavement and road-way and in the roadway between lanes (e.g. be-

tween cycle, bus and car lanes) are reduced or removed, involves individual users being given greater responsibility to observe each other’s behaviour and react accordingly. The evidence is that people are quite comfortable at behaving like this, find the experience of being in public richer, that footfall increases, traffic injuries decrease, road-widths can be reduced, delay times reduced and journey times shortened.

Learning points

• To survive, we have to make town centres that provide experiences that people want to come there to obtain.

• The design of streets is a key part of the design of town centres, and streets should be designed for all users, not just car-users.

• A holistic approach should be taken to street design, which incorporates the adjacent buildings as well as pavements, lighting and roadways.

• The segregation of cars and pedestrians should be ended, to allow each more freedom to moderate their behaviour in response to each other.

• The concept of shared space incorporates much of this thinking and its effect can now be examined in a number of completed schemes.

The support for

a new approach that already exists – policy, knowledge, practice

3. KEY POINTS: How can we change what we do a and create better streets?

Image: Hamilton-Baillie suggests that the apparent chaos and unpredicabilty of movement of skaters on an ice-rink provides is an appropriate metaphor for the behavior of motorists and pedestrians who flow through shared spaces

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4. FIND OUT MORE

The support for a new approach that already exists – policy, knowledge, practice

Policy and knowledgeStreets for All (English Heritage, 2005). Sets out principles of good practice for street man-agement – such as reducing clutter, co-ordinat-ing design and reinforcing local character.

http://www.helm.org.uk/server/show/category.19638

Manual for Streets (Department of Transport, 2007) and Manual for Streets 2 (2010). Provides guidance for practitioners involved in the planning, design, provision and approval of new residential streets, and modifications to existing ones.

http://www2.dft.gov.uk/pgr/sustainable/manforstreets/

This way to better streets (CABE, 2007) and This way to better residential streets (CABE, 2009) - plus associated case studies by CABE. Looking at streets in town centres, ring-roads and residential areas designed not to let the car dominate, instead enable people to get around, promote walking and cycling, civic pride and identity, provide safe play for children and allow the community to interact. Since CABE’s merger with the Design Council the current location

of CABE documents is best located through Google.

Highway Risk and Liability Claims (ICE, 2009) - challenging the assumptions of risk that have underpinned the dominance of high-way engineers in the design of streets and public space

ICE presentation by Rob Huxford on the responsibilities of highway engineers to prevent cars going faster

http://www.ice.org.uk/ice_upload/MGS_risk_liabilities.pdf

Designing Streets (Scottish Government, 2010). The first guidance in Scotland to mark a change in the emphasis in street design towards place-making and away from a system focused upon the dominance of motor vehicles. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2010/03/22120652/0

Local Transport Note on shared space (Department of Transport, forthcoming)

Best practice studies from SCOTSNET – the Society of Chief Officers of Transportation in Scotland

http://www.scotsnet.org.uk/best-practice.php

Smarter Choices, Smarter Places (SCSP) - a £15 million Scotland-wide initiative to encourage Scots to reduce their car use in favour of more sustainable alternatives such as walking, cycling and public transport.http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/roads/sustainable-transport/funding-for-projects/smarter-choices-smarter-places

SUSTRANS the promoters of the National Cycle Network also produce guidance on street design and liveable neighbourhoods -http://www.sustrans.org.uk/what-we-do/liveable-neigh-bourhoods/diy-streets

Living Streets – the national charity that stands up for pedestrians, working since 1929 to make the streets people live, work, shop and play in safe, attractive and enjoyable spaces.

http://www.livingstreets.org.uk/scotland/

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PracticeCompleted schemes cited by Ben Hamilton-Baillie –

• Kensington High Street, London (completed in 2003)

• Exhibition Road, London – ‘treating the street as a public space that re-con-nected the institutions along it who shared the space’

The work in the Netherlands of the traffic engineer Hans Mondermann (1945-2008), in particular schemes in –

• Makkinga – all barriers were removed and the streets could still work as highways

• Noordlaren, Groningen – where the school took down the wall separat-ing its playground from the main road into the town, and extended the playground ACROSS the road. This one move influ-enced the behaviour of traffic throughout the town.

• Drachten – removal of all sets of traffic lights

Mondermann said ‘the more traffic engineers engage with place, the safer places be-come’.

Work by Ben Hamilton-Baillie Associates

• Hereford Town Centre – treating roadway and pavement as one designed space to give more unified character to a declining retail street

• New Road, Brighton – creating a street attractive to a wider variety of users,

supporting different activity at different times of day and night, and bringing more business to the shops

• Ashford, Kent – changing a one-way circular road back to 2-way, creating a tree-lined boulevard between the roadways and a design speed of 18-19 mph. Journey times have improved, and the town has gained the confidence to implement further measures.

Image: The redesign of Exhibition Road in London will be the largest shared-space scheme in the world in terms of both numbers of pedestrians and vehicles, and geographical area.

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Scottish Government Architecture & Place Division

This document is published by the Scottish Government. If you would like to find out more about this publication, please contact Geraldine McAteer in the Architecture and Place Division of the Scottish Government.

Scottish Government APD. Area 2 J South, Victoria Quay, Edinburgh. EH6 6QQ

T: 0131 244 0548E: geraldine.mcateer@scotland.gsi.gov.uk

www.scotland.gov.uk

The views expressed in this Learning Point are not necessarily shared by the Scottish Government.