Please enable JavaScript.

Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.

STREET DESIGN : The Secret to Great Cities and Towns (Victor Dover, John…

- - - - People tend to notice the patterns of buildings, trees, and comfortable space that set better streets apart from the rest
    - - "Few people start to think about what makes them feel at home on the street in the first place"
      - COMMON PREFERENCE
    - - FROM PEOPLE TO PEOPLE
  - - - List of favorites streets and what made them special
        
        Personal preference (memories)
        
        Friends and Colleagues preference
        
        Library
        
        Online search
      - Re-examine the street in person
        
        Photograph
        
        Taking measurement
        
        Observing the way people behave
        
        Interact with people
      - Examine the change based on data and memories (better or worsen than before)
      - Problems found
        
        Automobiles taken over our streets
        
        Peter D. Norton's Organized Motordom
        
        Pushed everyone but the driver to the side of the road, even took sidewalk too.
        
        Automobiles oriented
        
        Pedestrian as an obstacle that must be removed
        
        Never ending noise-smell-and energy of cars
        
        Sheer volume of cars and trucks
  - - - Ensures that transportation planners and engineers consistently design and operate entire roadway with all users in mind --- including bicyclist, public transportation vehicles and riders, and pedestrian of all ages and abilities (www.smartgrowthamerica.org/complete-streets)
        
        Good News
        
        USA in a period of rebuilding streets with this Complete Street ideology
        
        Bad News
        
        Americans ignoring the basic rules of Placemaking in the attempts to create complete streets
        
        Design and build streets with specialized standard criteria (our street get worsen)
        
        No Beauty and the Harmony of the Place
        
        Placemaking not working
        
        1 more item...
        
        The formulaic of using specialized standard (yellow for pedestrian crossing, red bus lane, green bicycle tracks, ugly bumpouts,etc.)
        
        How it should be
        
        Look at world 's best street, and you will they don't have the special things
        
        Limited palette of materials in the roadbed and on the sidewalk
        
        When you visit, what you notice is the beauty and the harmony of the place, not the details like crosswalks or the bench selection
        
        Streetscapes become the crucial factor.
- - - - Streets where people want to be
        
        Street as Placemaking
      - Good City --- Good Streets
      - Streets need to be safe and comfortable,
        need to be interesting, and need to be beautiful.
        THEY NEED TO BE PLACES
      - Requires great building
        
        Street is the space between buildings
        
        Those space need the art of placemaking
        
        Placemaking makes the street spaces into settings where people want to be
    - - Auto-mobile based pattern
        
        (Figure 1.2)
        
        Six lane arterial road in the middle of nowhere lined with strip malls, shopping malls, big box etc
      - "Auto--Sewers" (James Howard Kunstler)
        
        Make a traffic flow like water in a pipe
      - A street that looks like made for cars
        
        No-one walks on them and avoid it
    - - They introduce innovations that make the street safer for those riding bikes or even traveling on foot, but at the same time they repeatedly diminish the space and beauty of the street for the walker.
        
        When you diminish the public realm, you diminish
        the common good.
      - Placemaking on public realm
  - - - res publica (public realm)
        
        shaped by
        
        the polis (city)
        
        The True City.The Architecture of Community. Léon Krier, 1983. To be complete, the city needs to have both a public realm and a private realm.
      - res privata (private realm)
    - - Shaping and programming the public realm into a place where pedestrians want to be
        
        Paris, France. An aerial photograph of the Right Bank from the early twentieth century. The Church of the Madeleine is at the center, and the place de la Concorde below.
        
        “The boldest conception of civic art makes it embrace not merely individual groups of buildings with their approaches and gardens but even entire cities. It is one thing to distribute fine groups of public buildings over the area of a city and to connect them effectively. It is a much more difficult thing to relate the entire city to such a scheme.”
        —Werner Hegemann and Elbert Peets, American Vitruvius: An Architects’ Handbook of Civic Art.
      - Strategically placing public building, so they are understood to be more important than the private building
        
        Market
        
        Place of worship
        
        Theatre
  - - - PRO
        
        "Grid is an efficient simple way to divide open land into rectangular lots with clear boundaries that allowed the easy establishment of title". (Commercial interest in early America Towns and Cities)
        
        Taming The Grid
        
        A beautiful tree canopy over a street
        
        Soften the Grid
        
        A variety of street types and street widths combined with short blocks and squares enriches a grid.
        
        In a town or city with gentle slopes, slightly bending the streets to follow the topography softens the grid
        
        Capitol Street, Charleston, West Virginia
        
        When a town or city has dramatic hills, like San Francisco, running the grid up and down the hills with little deformation can be visually and experientially interesting.
        
        San Francisco
        
        Shifting the grid, so that some streets are only three or four blocks long, adds variety and richness to the grid.
        
        Laying diagonals across grid
        
        Adds interest if the plan skillfully includes important buildings or monuments on the prominent sites created by the diagonals
        
        Add awkwardly shaped lots that require custom building designs
        
        Streets that open to the surrounding area can draw the landscape into the town.
      - CONTRA
        
        "Philadelphia is a handsome city, but distractingly regular. After walking about for an hour or two I felt that I would have given the world for a crooked street.”
        --- Charles Dickens (1842)
        
        Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1842), 39.
        
        A grid built without thought and attention
        to detail can be a rigid, unpleasant gridiron
      - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. William Penn, 1682. A plan of Philadelphia published in 1802. An early and influential American grid.
  - - - The Formal (The Regular One)
        
        Birth : 19th Century (based on Ancient Greek and Rome and Rennaisance)
        
        Classical principles
        
        Order
        
        Harmony
        
        Balance
        
        Legibility
        
        City Beautiful (Movement)
        
        Late 19th Century
        
        A Method
        
        Civic Art
        
        combined
        
        Urban Design
        
        Street Design
        
        Building Design
        
        Design and Placement of Monuments and Sclupture
        in City
        
        The founder studied architecture in Paris,
        Ancient Greece and Rome, cities of Italian
        Rennaisance and the Baroque of Western Europe
        
        which give birth to
        
        Reshaping American town and cities with the formal order found in the history of Classical architecture and urbanism of Europe
        
        with
        
        Enrich American Grid with a hierarchical range of streets and importantly sited civic buildings
        
        a problem arises
        
        1 more item...
        
        Regular
        
        Simple Grid
        
        More static and rigid
        
        Sited Civic Building
        
        Berhubungan
        
        by City Beautiful Movement
      - The Picturesque (The Irregular One/ The Informal)
        
        Birth : 19th Century (based on Medieval City)
        
        by Camilio Sitte
        
        Irregular
        
        The Picturesque Urbanism
        
        City Planning According to Artistic Principles
        by Camillio Sitte (1889)
        
        A Design based on the spaces that Sitte found pleasing in medieval streets, towns, and cities.
        
        Goal
        
        Make new places with experience as good as those produced by the best medieval design
        
        1 more item...
        
        Key
        
        Understanding how to produce engaging 3-dimentional spaces
        
        Marché aux poulets, Brussels. Drawing by Camillo Sitte, circa 1885. The composition of the gently curving street makes a space that deflects the view rather than formally terminating the vista with an object. The walk down the street presents a series of pictures and dynamic, unfolding events rather than a single static one.
        
        Based on Medieval Urbanism
        
        Street as sequential experience
        
        Asymmetrical composition
        
        Dynamically balanced
      - Hybrid Design
        (Combined Formal and Picturesque)
        
        by Sir Raymond Unwin
        
        Town Planning in Practice
        --- Sir Raymond Unwin (1907)
        
        Formal centers and street that became increasingly informal as they radiate outward
        
        Urban Transect based design
    - - Placemaking matters, as long as people belong there
  - - - Overdone/overblown streets
        
        What is that ?
        
        Adding fancy improvement at great expenses to the streets
        
        Starting in the 1970s, several well-intentioned streetscape fads have led towns and cities to pile on features like benches and bulbouts (curb extensions) to side walk in an effort to improve the street space.
        
        Like author mentioned earlier
        
        In retrospect they are costly and typically do little improve the vitality of the streets
        
        The effect ?
        
        An overblown streetscape will draw attention away from storefronts, which is problematic
        if retail revitalization is the goal.
        
        Overdone streetscapes work against the authenticity characteristic of genuine livable streets
        
        No Beauty and the Harmony of the Place
        
        Streetscapes
        
        What can we do ?
        
        Recruiting a mix of uses and shaping the street space with buildings (and street trees, when appropriate)
        
        This could achieve a larger and more lasting (sustainable) impact on the public realm
    - - If the design speed of the street were simply lowered, would a separate bike lane even be necessary?
      - Does the bike lane say to motorists that cyclists are to stay in their own space, when they customarily have rights to the whole road space on an urban street?
      - Are those tawdry-looking reflective plastic sticks buffering the bike lane proposed only because some other fundamental aspect of a flawed street design was left unaddressed?
      - Was killing off stores, shops, and restaurants by removing on street parking to jam in a bike lane really worth it—just to demonstrate that the city was finally doing something about cycling?
    - - One Scene
        
        Monumental Streets
        
        Long and Straight
        
        Visually terminated by a monument or a monumental building
        
        Background building that make up the urban fabric will have a majestic presence enhanched rather than dimnished by repetition
        
        Rue Royale, Paris, France, A hand-tinted view from the place de la Concorde
        
        The French masterfully
        plotted streets like this
      - Several Scene
        
        Streets Segmentation
        
        Less monumental streets
        
        A series of individual segments laid end-to-end, with their own fine-tuned spatial recipe
        
        The segments might only a block long or a few block long
        
        Each segment had their own character (character can vary)
        
        Different total width and buillding-height-to-street-width proprtion
        
        Mixtures of older and newer building that unfold as we travel along the road
        
        Spatial segment are defined at their ends
        
        by
        
        Intersection
        
        1 more item...
        
        Terminated vistas
        
        1 more item...
        
        Curves
        
        1 more item...
        
        Cranks
        
        1 more item...
        
        Offsets
        
        1 more item...
        
        This is a useful way for the urban designer to see the street spaces of a contemporary metropolis—as a series of interconnected spatial experiences that are stitched to gether
        and perfected independently and gradually.
        
        1 more item...
        
        High Street,
        Dumfries, Scotland.
        
        Carrer Avinyó, Barcelona, Spain. Streets can be thought of as segmented spatial experiences, perfected independently and stitched together.
    - - Challenges in Placemaking
      - To make our streets places where people want to be
        
        Placemaking in Streets
        
        focus on
        
        Physical Planning
        
        Designing the physical form of the city, town, or neigborhood
        
        Configuring Beautiful, Durable, and Sustainable place for people
        
        Placemaking
  - - - Walkable Streets
        
        they are tend to be
        
        The environments where households, businesses and institutions prosper
        
        The ones where cyclist are most comfortable
        
        The ones that make public transit most practical
        
        The ones where investments in infrastructure and property are rewarded with revenue
        
        because
        
        These streets allow for human interaction face to face instead of through windshields
        
        They tend to encourage the social bonds between neighbors and strangers that help solve problems and let democracy flourish
        
        Tend to be the safest, most beautiful,and sustainable.
      - "From there we add the other ingredients in the amounts necessary for each street segment’s individual recipe: cycling, motoring, deliveries, garbage pickup,emergency response, utilities, parking, and other considerations can be incorporated in a balanced way once walking is established as the foundation of the design".
        Victor Dover, “Twenty-three” in Emily Talen, Ed., Charter of the New Urbanism (New York: McGraw-Hill Professional, 2nd Ed., 2013), 211.
      - Principles of Walkability
        
        Shaped
        
        Spatial enclosure of streets
        
        "Walls"
        
        Facades of the building and/or the column-like trunks of street trees
        
        "Floor"
        
        Surface of the sidewalks and roadway
        
        "Ceilings"
        
        The canopy of the mature trees gives a “ceiling” to the room and limits how far we see in each direction, so that the space is visually contained.
        
        The proportional relationship between building height and street width and the continuity of the street walls are the prime determinants of the sense of place and street character.
        
        Placemaking, Sense of Place, Urban Character
        
        Comfortable
        
        Architectural features that control the effects of the climate can be a crucial ingredient in local distinctiveness.
        
        Distinctiveness, Urban Character
        
        Safe
        
        "Natural Surveillance"
        
        Streets that seem to be watched over by windows, doors, storefronts, or balconies feel safer than streets lined with blank walls
        
        Having other people around
        
        Having the confidence that if we were to fall ill or have an accident, a call for help will be heard.
        
        CPTED (Crime Prevention through Environmental Design) document, or Defensible Space by Oscar Newman (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
        
        Safe from automobiles
        
        Connected
        
        Walkable streets are almost always part of an integrated network—ideally, one with small blocks, so that there are many possible routes.
        
        The best street networks offer the pedestrian not only choices about which path to take but also a variety of experiences.
        
        Streetscapes variety
        
        When street vistas are arranged to create a sequence of legible segments, marked by landmarks that help with wayfinding and orientation, walkers have a sense of how the street space is knitted into the fabric of the surrounding neighborhood.
        
        Streetscape, Streetvistas, Legibility, Sense of Place, Streetscape Variety
        
        "Space Syntax"
        
        2 more items...
        
        Interesting, Memorable
        
        We are attracted to places that are beautiful and distinctive.
        
        We are drawn to the places that have richness, texture, and character
        
        We tend to return to the places where the three-dimensional geometry of urban design and architecture is employed, in conspicuous or subtle ways, to create street scenes that unfold in some theater-like progression.
        
        Urban Character, Streetscape, Street Scene, Urban Distinctive
        
        Beauty is not something extra to be added in after all of the other decisions about a street have already been made; it’s the one ingredient without which no street is ever “complete”
  - - - Building better streets can be an effective way to address climate change.
      - Agreeable street design encourages people
        to replace driving trips with walking, cycling, or transit use, reducing greenhouse gas emissions and the consumption of fossil fuels.
      - Good streets help the environment on another, more subtle level.
        
        Walkable streets with bike lanes and mass transit reinforce a variety of broad environmental goals
        
        Controlling sprawl
        
        Reducing regional energy consumption
        
        Protecting Watershed
        
        Stemming the loss of farmland and wilderness
      - Sets up its adjacent places for perpetual use and reuse.
        
        Reoccupying previously settled land more densely and giving historic buildings new life also ac commodates population growth and economic change.
        
        Ultimate Recycle Process
      - Sustainable development starts with the street.
        
        If a person can walk or bike to a destination, decreasing fossil fuel use and reducing daily Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT), then her or his commute becomes more efficient
  - - - 3 types (facilities)
        
        Arterials
        
        Collectors
        
        Road Hierarchy Diagram. Image courtesy of Dover, Kohl & Partners, redrawn from a Wisconsin DOT manual
        
        Proportion of Service Diagram for the Functional Classification System. Image courtesy of Dover, Kohl & Partners, redrawn from the 1969 Federal Aid Highways report
        
        Local Roads
      - Favors the car over all other modes of transportation, including walking
        
        Judges a road’s effectiveness by its “Level of Service” (LOS)
        
        Measures the free flow of the automobile: How easy is it to drive from one place to another?
      - 3 guiding principles
        
        The longer the trip, the faster the travel speed should be.
        
        The faster the road speed, the more isolated the road should be from its surroundings.
        
        Isolated roads are considered bottlenecks, so they must grow wider as “Vehicle Miles Traveled" (VMT) grow.
- - - - This chapter reintroduces eleven essential street types with case studies and commentary to explain how each type fits into a larger urban system.
      - BOULEVARD & AVENUE
      - MULTIWAY BOULLEVARD & MULTIWAY AVENUE
      - PROMENADE & RAMBLA
      - MAIN SREETS
      - DOWNTOWN STREETS
      - NEIGHBORHOOD STREET
      - YIELD STREET
      - GARDEN STREETS
      - PEDESTRIAN STREETS
      - PEDESTRIAN PASSAGE & STEP STREET
      - PARKWAY
- - - - Shared Space