The Street: A Quintessential Social Public Space

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The Street. A Quintessential Social Public Space
Vikas Mehta
Abingdon and New York, Routledge, 2013, 237pp., £55.00 hardback
ISBN 978-0-415-52710-1
Book Review: Ken Taylor Landscape Research Vol 39 No 5 Oct 2014: 599-601
This is a welcome addition to the literature on cities as places of social encounter and
cultural interchange with a specific focus on the street, that ubiquitous setting for
much of our urban activities and experiences. At a personal level for me it is one of
the continuing fascinations with visiting Asian cities such as Bangkok - which
interestingly now has over 16 million visitors per year, which is more than London -
and experiencing kaleidoscopic life on the streets,.
Whilst this book is not about urban conservation or heritage its focus on streets having
a social behavioural value does link with the emergent Historic Urban Landscape
(HUL) paradigm. This is where historic towns and cities are not merely viewed as
collections of monumental architectural significance or as ensembles of buildings, but
as living, vibrant communities of people.
The book is extensively illustrated with monochrome illustrations in the form of
photographs, sketches and line drawings. These support the importance of the fact that
up to one third to one half of land in cities is devoted to streets and that streets of all
types support myriad cultural, economic, political and social activities. As the author
opines the book is about the sociability of streets and argues that one of the cardinal
roles of the street, as public space, is to provide a setting for a range of active and
passive social behaviours. The book is intrinsically about people rather than the street
as a sterile design exercise divorced from everyday life. The book focuses on local
retail streets, not residential where the author claims considerable work has been
done. The Street therefore has the stated aim of providing readers with the tools to
create sociable streets and in my view achieves this with a fluent and easy to read text.
The book is in two parts. The first part (3 chapters) neatly deals with a theoretical and
historical understanding of the street as an urban public space integrated with a
discussion of an understanding of everyday behaviour as a basis for design. The
second part presents design and management tools necessary to create lively and
sociable streets using an empirical study of three retail streets.
There are three chapters in part 1. Chapter 1 starts as a succinct overview of the street
as a multidimensional and interpretative urban space meaning different things to
different people. This is followed by dissection of the street as sociable phenomenon
involving the idea of sociable streets, which the author acknowledges is not new.
Nevertheless his revisiting of this idea is welcome in its reminder of the timeless
meaning of what a street is socially. Chapter 2 is a short, but to the point, review of
the social history of the street. It ends with commentary on the changing meaning and
use of streets seen for example in the tension between the privatisation of public
spaces, shopping malls and so on that have usurped the traditional main street creating
a counter need for active and passive engagement supporting public life in such things
as coffee shops, restaurants, bookshops. Coupled with examples of cities creating
pedestrian streets Mehta refers to this as a resurgence of the people street. Chapter 3 is
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a discourse on everyday social behaviour on the street as a basis for design where
human behaviour occurs as a result of the interaction between people and setting. This
is the all-important understanding of cultural context to any place meaning. It is that
something that always grabs me personally when visiting our daughter in Lower East
Side, Manhattan, and what I find an intensely satisfying experience walking the
streets. Not that any would win any urban design awards, but so what? My only crib
about this chapter is in the opening paragraph where Mehta, quoting Dear and Wolch1,
invokes the suggestion that social relations may be constituted through space:
constrained space or meditated space. I suggest we need to ask is it space or place and
think when does space become place with that all important ingredient, sense of place.
Here, I am reminded of J B Jackson’s observation
Most of us, I suspect, without giving much thought to the matter, would say that a sense of place, a
sense of being at home in a town or city, grows as we become accustomed to it and learn to know its
peculiarities. It is my belief that a sense of place is something that we ourselves create in the course of
time. It is the result of habit or custom.2
Part 2 starts with chapter 4 which is an analysis of three streets in the Boston
Metropolitan area: Massachusetts Avenue, Central Square area of Cambridge Mass.;
Harvard Street, Davis Square area of Brookline; and Elm Street, Coolidge Corner,
Somerville. These are streets with a mix of uses in a variety of low rise buildings:
retail at street level, some office space and some residential on upper levels. Adjoining
streets are residential. The empirical analysis involved observation, interviews and
surveys and seeing where people were and what they were doing: lingering,
engagement in active social behaviour and where there are zones of activity, and how
long people stayed. From this the author looks at how lively sites were, their role as
settings for social behaviour and a sociability index.
Chapter 5 deals with a typology of social behaviours in sociable streets, suggesting
that for public spaces to be become popular it is imperative that designers, planners
and managers of public spaces know what people do in public space. One wonders
how often such basic anthropological information is inherent in showy urban design
plans we see advertising urban redevelopment or new development. Chapter 6
continues the theme with a review of the needs for social behaviour on streets. Using
qualitative and quantitative information from the interviews, surveys and observations
there is a discussion on factors that matter to people and that are important in
supporting passive, fleeting and enduring social behaviour and the all important
aspect of retaining people on the street. The chapter concludes with an overview of
the street as a meaningful place for everyday use. The boxes and illustrations,
including photographs and sketches I found most helpful in bringing the ideas to life.
The final chapter 7 nicely draws the whole text together looking at the challenges
confronting the idea of the social street. It also offers design, planning and
management guidelines for making sociable neighbourhood commercial streets.
Going through my mind reading the book was the question of whether the ideas and
techniques could transfer readily to a non-western culture, specifically the vibrant
streets and street life of towns and cities in South and Southeast Asia. The author does
in fact address this question through an exploration of a commercial street in Delhi.
He approaches this from the standpoint that it is critical to look at street cultures that
support a vibrant social life, and presumably, one hopes, in the appreciation that
different cultural contexts and values to a western paradigm prevail.
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This book ought to be set reading for those in urban design practice and on the
required reading list of university urban design courses.
Ken Taylor
Research School of Humanities and Arts
The Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
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1 Dear, M, & Wolch, J, (1989), ‘How territory shapes social life’ in J Wolch and M Dear (eds), The Power of
Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life, Boston MA: Unwin Hyman.
2 Jackson, J.B, 1994, A Sense of PLACE, a Sense of TIME, p.151; New Haven: Yale University
Press.