Streets as a service for social connection…
Streets are the arteries of a city, they connect us to services — utilities, water, gas, electricity. How can we reimagine and design streets as services for facilitating connection between neighbours?
I’ve lived on 15 streets over my lifetime. How many have you lived on?
It’s interesting to look back to the different types of streets I have experienced and understand their design and what impact that had on the interactions and connections that were fostered, or not, with my neighbours.
Here’s Cleasby Road, in Menston, a village in West Yorkshire where I lived for 17 years. It’s a bus route, close to a station, a grey street, houses with neat gardens that my mum and I explored once a year delivering the local community magazine. I never played on my street or knew my neighbours as I got the bus to school in town. I used to dream of having local friends to go to the park with, to sit and chat aimlessly, but most of my friends lived in other towns and villages nearby and I’d need to be dropped off and picked up. I used to crave the freedom to explore and traipse my local area.
I lived in Sri Lanka for a year before university, staying with a family who lived on this street. This unmade road connected hundreds of homes, hidden from view of the road, dispersing from tiny, narrow footpaths off this central artery. A family’s access would often only be on foot and vehicles on Ambulambe road were a rarity in 2004; three wheelers, push bikes and walking were the most popular ways to travel towards the paved road into town. In the heat we’d carry umbrellas to shield us from the hot sun and never be without cloths to wipe the sweat that gathered. This street was the heartbeat of the neighbourhood, where gossip was passed, children played, places for people to sit and relax outside the small shops and watch the activity of the street. People wanted the road to be paved, to make it easier in the rainy season to pass — and signal the start of development for the neighbourhood.
During university years in Birmingham I lived in an almost exclusively student neighbourhood of Selly Oak in a range of different private rented properties with friends. We didn’t remember which day to put the rubbish out on and didn’t know how or have the equipment to trim the hedge or cut the grass. I didn’t know my neighbours and was much more interested in going away at weekends with the officer training corps, getting drunk in town almost every night of the week and trying to effectively manage sleep deprivation during lectures.
This is a street in the Northwest region of Cameroon where I lived for a year after university working with farming co-operatives and local government on participation and governance projects. Again, streets were places for connection, life and colour. Proximity to a paved road meant you were more likely to access health care, trading and selling opportunities, education and of course travel. Many older people in the villages I visited as part of my work had never left their village. Travel was hard, difficult, slow and expensive, especially in the wet season by motorbike or shared taxi/minibus. A paved street was a luxury.
I’ve spent the last 8 years in Hackney, London on various streets from busy A roads, to quiet residential streets. In these 8 years I’ve slowly found my way and navigated towards a career path that combines community engagement (people), with place (a street or space) through changes (interventions) that aim to bring people together (community) either through the process of deciding or designing the change (collaborative design) or through the result of that change (impact).
Much of my work over the past few years with Sustrans and now at Street Space has been about discovering the relationship between traffic and the scope residents have to shape changes or connect with their neighbours as well as the opportunity or freedom people feel they have to choose happier, healthier travel such as walking and cycling.
I’ve become obsessed with the power of streets to knit and weave the fragmented fabric of community back together. The forgotten grey, boring streets in between new or old developments, parks, stations, schools. Often unnoticed by urban designers, architects or planners and seen as being reserved, almost unquestioningly as space for the car, either parked or moving. Perceived to be unchangeable, with a hierarchy of other road users — pedestrians of course at the bottom of the food chain. But times are changing. With younger people moving away from car ownership in urban areas, huge improvements to public transport services for London and transformational programmes to promote and enable walking and cycling — space on the street is being discovered, and reclaimed!
Many people I meet during community engagement long for safe, equitable spaces and places to meet their neighbours and an opportunity to build a sense of belonging. Many feel nostalgic towards a simpler time when being part of a ‘community’ was a real, and unifying force of identity and sense of belonging. People I listen to express a sense of great loss — craving to know what’s right and wrong in a world of increasing complexity, to know their neighbours and slowly build a sense of trust with those who they share a place with. Streets have the power to provide all these.
This power can be realised in two ways:
- through the opportunity for neighbours to participate in a collaborative design process, together, creating a vision for their street or neighbourhood; designing, testing and ultimately shaping changes to streets and spaces that they want to see e.g. DIY Porter’s Lodge
- through the impact of redesign or transformation of streets and spaces to reduce traffic dominance and therefore creating space for more social connections, local economic opportunity, cleaner, safer environment and opportunity for improved wellbeing, physical activity and pride in a neighbourhood e.g. Francis Road, Leyton.
Donald Appelyard’s research way back in 1960's made the link between traffic dominance and lack of social connection. We know that 9 million people are lonely in the UK. Community services and centres across the country are struggling for funds. How can we use the street as a service and make it work for us? How can we collaboratively design our streets to make them more liveable and places for connection?
The potential is huge — 80% of public space in London is made up of streets. Everyone lives on one.
There are no easy answers but I think as a unit for change, and a place to start there is huge potential in resident action to change streets and build community. Many inspiring examples such as playing out and big lunch have already demonstrated the significant impact temporary closures to traffic (opening the street for people) can have and the number of connections made.
Streets hold the potential to unlock and build a sense of belonging, pride, permission and agency for both existing and long term residents in streets all over London, in places experiencing huge change. Applying service design thinking to streets and seeing the potential for them to offer far more than ‘movement’ and ‘place’ but also ‘belonging’ and trust building is a powerful proposition worth collaborating for in the movement towards building strong, healthy communities.
