How can councils improve streets? By working with the community, says a new toolkit developed by Create Streets and JTP.
Cash-strapped councils can find it hard to implement current thinking on urban development, with devastating results – soulless housing developments with little design flair and a near-absent sense of community and place. Even worse, they are built entirely to promote car use, leading to unhealthy and sedentary lifestyles.
Now Create Streets – a social enterprise and research institute which promotes high-density and beautiful design in a traditional streetscape – in collaboration with JTP, have produced a toolkit to help local authorities make better choices.
Called Healthy Streets for London, the report highlights ten ‘healthy street’ indicators:
So how can local authorities find out if streets meet these criteria? The report says they should create a collaborative relationship with residents – a technique called a charrette. Charrettes are intensive and interactive design workshops where the community and other stakeholders work together with designers and architects to share knowledge, problem-solve and develop creative solutions to improve places.
“It’s a combination of things,” says Charles Campion, a partner at JTP, “that create great places, healthy communities and people and strong local economies. It’s not just one thing. Air quality is high on the agenda at the moment, but so are what high streets are facing.
“But some shops are having difficulties, while some high streets are thriving because they’ve adopted a placemaking approach.
“Where people have been involved and have shaped their communities, they say the same thing – they want clean air, they want slower speeds, they want greener streets. Then you need a step by step approach to implementing it. That’s what the charrette does.”
And it works. “If US cities still had those fine-grained walkable mixed-use inner-city quarters, rather than the urban renewal program,” argues Campion, “they would now be thriving popular places to live, with top value. That’s the Create Streets and JTP message.”
The toolkit is designed to align with the Mayor of London’s Transport Strategy and the Healthy Streets Approach. But it could equally apply to anywhere in the U.K. or any country with a tendency to overlook a democratic process in planning.
Jane Jacobs (quoted in the toolkit) argued that “Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” It’s all about working with, not against, the community. Tree-felling Sheffield Council should take note – people know best what kind of streets they want.
As Campion says: “What a lot of people say to me is that you showed us the placemaking agenda that actually thinks about the whole place and what it means – the roads, the shops, the experience of the place. It's opened our eyes, and we look at everything differently. That's gratifying to hear.
“It's what I feel. You go down a road and think that trees would improve it greatly. Or why don't shopkeepers take more care of their shop fronts? That bit of land could easily be paved to create a public space.
“You can actually give people the opportunity to be involved they can work out what is unique about their own place and what would work for their own place.”
Deborah Talbot is a freelance journalist and researcher specializing in urban and rural economies, development and culture. You can follow her on Twitter @DeborahHTalbot.