"Street Reclaiming": Traffic calming on steroids

David Engwicht's "Second Generation" traffic calming techniques encourage cities and citizens to take another look at their streets and neighborhoods:

Reclaiming through activity starts with understanding how we lost our streets in the first place. Feeling intimidated by cars, parents told their children not to play in the street. Traffic automatically went faster. So parents told their kids not to play on the sidewalk. Traffic speed up. So residents retreated even further. In some cases, people even stopped parking their cars in the street. Each step in this retreat was an invitation for traffic to go faster. Street reclaiming involves reversing this retreat and moving neighborhood activities back towards the street. Increasing the amount of neighborhood activity in the street need not cost residents any time at all. Simply moving everyday activities closer to the roadway slows traffic.

Movement space vs. living space:

Cities, like houses, have two types of space: 'movement' space and 'exchange' (or living) space. In a house, the corridors are primarily for movement and the rooms for exchange (conversations with friends, meals, reading a book, etc.) No one asks an architect to design them a house with lots of big corridors and tiny rooms. It is popular wisdom that corridors 'are a waste of space' because what we value in the house is not moving but the living that takes place in each room. To minimize corridors and maximize living space, architects combine the two into the one space so that rooms become both a place for exchange and a place for movement.

Early city builders used the same technique to reduce the need for 'movement corridors'. Public living space and movement space were combined and streets and public squares were treated as 'outdoor living rooms', not as 'corridors'. This arrangement dramatically improved the efficiency of the city and enriched the social, cultural and economic life of the city.