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A review by Joel Crawford of CarFree Cities
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Street Reclaiming: Creating Livable Streets and Vibrant Communities David Engwicht
Gabriola Island, BC, Canada
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This nicely produced book is a worthy addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in the effects of traffic on city life, and, as the title implies, how to take back the streets. Engwicht has approached the issues from the micro-scale, here-and-now, in contrast to my own book which starts with theoretical principles and proceeds to practical application. Engwicht wants to help you make your street much better this year; I'm offering a vision for how our cities might look 20 years hence. For all the difference in their approach to the question, the two books are strikingly similar in the end product they would offer: streets returned to human uses, which of necessity means dramatically reducing the impact of motorized traffic.
The book begins with a look at the effects cars have had on the use of streets as social spaces. This material will be familiar to those who know Donald Appleyard’s Livable Streets. Engwicht moves on to a strategy for cutting traffic by half on the basis of
neighborhood cooperation and increased local economic activity. Not all of this change can be achieved by a single street working together; the mixed-use neighborhoods that I and so many others advocate as the cornerstone for civilized urbanity can only be achieved by a change in policy and subsequent redevelopment.
Street reclaiming is the process of taking streets designed for cars and turning them into spaces for people. Quite a lot of this is based on the principles of A Pattern Language, and rightly so. The most important work is to construct a sense of enclosure - to bring an end to streets as endless vistas of asphalt that belong to nobody. He pleads for the creation of an entrance that announces that you've left the amorphous public realm and entered a neighborhood. The stratagems for building a living street are the heart of the book.
"Six weeks to less traffic" is the how-to chapter. The technique could be summed up as: "Get together with your neighbors and just do it." He makes an interesting comparison with the changes in attitude regarding cigarette smoking, where, in the span of just a decade, smoking moved from being almost universally accepted to being restricted to just a few areas, almost none of them inside public buildings. The major strategies for developing cooperation are:
Engwicht was disillusioned when his first book was misused: some of the fundamental principles he thought he had established were ignored in favor of other, more concrete principles. In particular, he felt that the things that could not be photographed tended to be ignored in favor of those things that could be photographed. The physical changes had been taken out of their social context, vitiating the work. To prevent this from afflicting this newer work, Engwicht concluded with the section "Preserving the Heart: Eight Myths Exposed." By this means he hopes to avoid some of the misunderstandings that arose from his earlier book.
Engwicht closes with "Streets Ahead - Dare to Dream... and Create," a short chapter that offers a joyful vision of the best of the past combined with new dreams: "The future belongs to those who dare to create."
The only important area of disagreement I have with Engwicht is the question of the value of long-term planning. While I agree with Engwicht that long-term planning is certainly not a sufficient basis for urban development, I disagree with his belief that it can be neglected entirely. He states: "…any master plan for reforming the transport system of a city must be focused on the task of creating healthy neighborhood cells, not on trying to reform the entire system from the top down." (p 180) I believe that it is necessary to have a vision for the end condition; otherwise, the incremental steps cannot proceed past the point at which they begin to conflict with one another. It’s all very well and good to make dramatic reductions in car use, and the sooner the better, but if you seek to arrive at a condition where car use within a city stops entirely, it’s necessary to have that as a goal from the beginning and to make sure that the various steps taken towards that goal do not carry the seeds of their own failure. It will also be necessary to make large investments in better passenger and freight transport - you can get rid of the first half of the traffic fairly easily. Getting rid of the second half is going to require rail-based public transport for both goods and people, and that requires central planning.
One final caveat: the book is written from an Australian perspective. While conditions in the USA are similar in many important respects to those in Australia, there are appreciable differences, chief among them the dreadful state of public transport in most US cities. Also, there's still a little bit of the freewheeling frontier mentality in Australia. You might find yourself in trouble with the local authorities if you attempt to replicate some of Engwicht's strategies in North America.
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