While (some) North Americans celebrate the changes to the public realm in places like Times Square and the parklets of San Francisco, it’s often with great angst. Hornby Street, anyone?
So it can be helpful to check out what’s happening in Europe as it also transforms its urban environments, sometimes dramatically and with considerably less hysteria.
Two examples:
Exhibition Road, London
Roads and pavements are rules, keeping hard cars and soft pedestrians apart. Lane markings, pedestrian crossings and steel railings are another layer of rules. Do we really need such nannying? What if we relaxed the rules a little?
This is exactly what’s happening at London‘s Exhibition Road, the great Victorian thoroughfare that stretches half a mile from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park in London. In the last 18 months, it has been ripped up and remade to a new design that all but abolishes the distinction between road and pavement. Instead, there’s one continuous surface, cross-hatched dramatically in black-and-white granite. Pedestrians can wander where they like: they’ll just have to negotiate the cars and bicycles. It’s all very liberal, and something of an experiment.
Before:
After:
.
Place de la Republique
From Stephane Kirkland’s blog:
Construction begins this week on the new Place de la République, a project 150 years in the making. …
The new design audaciously takes the step of removing the six lanes of traffic from the north-east side of the square so that the huge pedestrian area in the center is no longer an isolated island. A street will remain, but it is much narrower and reduced to buses, taxis and two-wheeled traffic.
Before:
After:
It is worth noting that the City of Paris has put in place something close to best practice communication with citizens for its major projects. It has created a web site (placedelarepublique.paris.fr) on which it provides updates on construction and impact on users of the space (parking, trafic routes, etc), an interactive map of changes, and background material including a fun video of users of the square and their perspectives.
I may just be too rigid in my thinking for the London example (I would expect a fair bit of confussion/conflict) but I love the look of the Paris example.
I think the level of confusion is the goal pursued: it is one of the key to make the “shared space” working.: “The street, […] unpredictable, incalculable, and deeply social” (quote from the link on le Corbusier post). makes “you automatically reduce your speed, you have contact with other people and you take greater care” </em (quote of the Deutshe Welle).
It is also the pursued goal in the Paris Place de la Republique design for its north side:
Notice the buses and car on the north side of the Piazza: that will be also a shared space, with bike and pedestrian (that to connect seamlessly the central part to the edge).
At least for Paris, there is another very controversial project- the definitive closure of the expressway on the River seine bank (it is actually closed only in summer for "paris-Plage"):
here, there is certainly lot of angst and theatrical drama:
the Place of the Republique project could be compared to one like a "pedestrianization" of Robson square (which could have followed the same principle of shared space to accommodate the buses – What we see now is just a source of lamentation), when the closure of the river bank expressway could be compared to the removal of the viaducts…
Also, notice, that not everyone is a cyclist, but everyone is a pedestrian, and everyone can feel that there is some benefit to the beautification of the public space (save for the lightpole, Granville Mall could be another source of lamentation – ironically Place de la Republique is planned to be outfitted with lightpole a la Granville Mall)
– putting some barrier to segregate some space to the benefit of a single marginal category, be cyclists, or latte sippers, is another game, where there are some "losers".
The Dutch are famous for their “let the users figure the street rules out” approach, and it seems to work for them. The British, on the other hand, are extreme in how they like to structure the use of streets, creating such rigid rules that in practice people do not follow them very much. It will be interesting to see how experimenting with a change in approach will work.
In London right now, I can add two projects for major public spaces that are under construction right now at Tottenham Court Road and Leicester Square. Both should be quite interesting.
Gord, I get your point about angst, but does the Hornby bike lane constitute good public realm?
Agree with Voony’s points about shared space – places like Granville Mall, Robson Square, the square in front of the VAG/Courthouse on Georgia, after decades of tweaking still disappoint.
Thanks, Stephane, for weighing in. I’ll explore your website with interest.