5 minute read
Urban Lanes
Dr. Miza Moreau
Dr. Miza Moreau is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Environmental Design and Planning at the University of Glasgow. She works at the intersection of urban and environmental studies, and design. Prior to focusing on research, she practiced as a landscape architect and urban designer in Australia and the United States.
Boundary wall in lane that became a green wall (Melbourne)
© MIza Moreau
When thinking about cities and a post-Covid recovery, one thing is certain: the pandemic has highlighted the urgent need to address the systems that have not worked well. One of those things is equitable access to public green spaces for recreation, socialisation, and civic engagement.
Addressing this issue, however, would require a willingness to explore new ideas, because in established neighbourhoods, large parcels of available land for creation of new parks are difficult to find. Also, in areas with housing shortages, creating new parks at the expense of affordable housing would be difficult to justify. Even neighbourhoods with a good amount of open green space need to make best use of what they have to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.
For over two decades, design and planning literature has called for consideration of how left-over and residual urban spaces could be incorporated better for public use. However, the aesthetic, functional, and legal ambiguities surrounding these spaces are not within the comfort zones of some municipal planners or professional designers. In his 1995 seminal essay, Terrain Vague, Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió criticized designers for inevitably turning ambiguous spaces into something recognizable and conventional, instead of valuing their unique qualities.
Neighbours gather for a “long-lunch” in their lane (Melbourne)
© MIza Moreau
One type of ambiguous urban space, commonly found in inner city neighbourhoods that have a shortage of open space, is the residential lane (or laneway, alley, alleyway). An individual lane is a small piece of land, but considered collectively, residential lanes can add to hundreds of linear kilometres or hundreds of hectares of prime urban land. Established for unsightly but necessary domestic services, residential lanes offer narrow, road-like access to the backs of plots and buildings. Being connected to public footpaths, these lanes could also serve as valuable pedestrian shortcuts. However, when they are poorly managed and looking derelict, they are assumed to harbour antisocial activities. In fact, lane-gating programmes are not uncommon in the UK, with the rationale being a way to deal with crime (real or perceived) is by blocking public access.
There are examples of city-wide programmes in North America that regard residential lanes as assets, although the focus of these schemes and their implementations vary. The City of Chicago’s Green Alleys initiative, for example, focuses on the installation of permeable pavers in residential lanes for urban stormwater management. In San Francisco, California, the Living Alleys programme provides matching funds to community groups to work with the City to transform their lanes permanently into socially viable spaces. In Montreal, Canada, residents can get support through the Ruelle Verte program to appropriate their lanes into common green spaces.
In Melbourne, Australia, lanes in the Central Business District have undergone a significant change, transforming from derelict to economically, socially, and culturally valuable spaces. Melbourne lanes are associated with cafés and restaurants, street art, and cultural programmes. Their success is due to a combination of different programmes that the city has implemented over the past three decades. However, just a few kilometres away, lanes in residential neighbourhoods are still forgotten spaces to their councils, although for local residents and the general public, they still function as pedestrian networks, informal art galleries, social and food growing spaces, and green corridors. Most of this functionality happens without council initiatives or involvement, so the value of these activities is often unrecognized or regarded as “illegal,” and thus susceptible to removal (although some gardens have lasted for years and decades).
In the world of post-COVID-19 green recovery, could residential lanes become valued urban spaces without being privatized by businesses or formally managed by the councils? For several years, I studied the informal appropriations of Melbourne’s residential lanes in relation to their morphology, and found that they were used for gardening and food sharing, domestic repairs and socializing, street art and staged exhibitions, informal walking and organized cycling events, and much more. While collectively lanes can be used for many purposes, not every individual lane was the best place for every activity. Some lanes were regularly used for car access, while others were too narrow for cars to move through or turn into garages. Some lanes were permeable and connected, and were often used for walking.
Street art can convert lanes to culturally viable places (Melbourne)
© MIza Moreau
Other lanes were dead-ended, and while the general public had little use for them, their residents had appropriated them into gardens. Some lanes were visible from the streets on one or both ends, while others were hidden. Laneways varied in their lengths, paving materials, sun exposure, and many other factors that would affect how they could be used. Each lane was bordered by dozens of residential plots with various kinds of public/private interfaces that mostly worked in an opposite manner to what works in other spaces (e.g., high streets). Blank interfaces of fences, walls, back doors, and garages were associated with gardening, socializing, and art appropriations, as well as informal green walls and other vegetation.
Just as individual lanes could differ from each other, neighbourhoods in which the lanes are found vary as well. In some neighbourhoods, residents know how to lobby for and implement the kinds of changes they want to see. In others, residents, for whatever reasons, do not embark on changing their lanes. So, when thinking about what kind of policies councils could apply, it is important to be aware of these differences. In some areas, residents could be allowed to appropriate lanes as needed, while in others, local councils might need to be involved in starting and managing change until residents can take care of it themselves.
The unprecedented experience of a global pandemic, coupled with the climate emergency, will hopefully unlock new ways of approaching local challenges. Because if not now, then when? Residential lanes are spaces of many possibilities, but it will take commitment to understand their multiple spatial and social potentials, and to be able to employ site-specific strategies for unlocking those possibilities.
Dead-end lane converted to an informal garden (Melbourne)
© MIza Moreau
