Streets / Brain

1. A public road in a city or town that has houses and buildings on one side or both sides

2. The ideas and opinions of ordinary people, especially people who live in cities, which are considered important

We tend to think about streets as obnoxious tools that, yet having a pervasive presence in our lives, stand in the background. The very existence of human civilization is based on the physical connection of people, information, and goods like streets.

Cities themselves are designed around the role of streets. Like with we do with our nervous system we are prone to ignore the presence of the streets as something not understandable and dangerous if messed up with. Streets have not evolved in centuries the ways we implemented the urban have changed a lot, especially during the last decades.

As a hardware device, the road of the early XXI century is like the street of the early XX century. Why? What can we do to evolve the way we use this tool?

Streets should go from spaces of conflict to areas of attraction. We should evolve this paradigm by putting the user expe- rience at the very center of the concept: streets should not be just fast-flow devices but spaces with clear connotations and atmospheres, with such a quality that people and not cars should become the main actors involved.

By putting human beings on top of the agenda, we should turn streets into physically and socially safer places, where flexibility is a must to create adaptable frameworks of operation to better cope with disruptive innovation of future mobility and the climate crisis challenges.

OOur space perception has changed over time as the speed of our movements has increased. Quoting Richard Ingersoll in “Sprawltown”, when the pedestrian became a driver, the theatrical order of the urban street was converted into a cinematic one, composed of long shots, close-ups, panoramas, and an accelerated montage of jump cuts.

The fact that the streets have changed over time, turning into ‘car spaces’, does not exclude the possibility of reconverting them - even partially - into pedestrian or green spaces. Mobility has always characterised the life of urban centres, but the problem is given by unmanageable flows, heavy traffic, and saturation of every available empty spot by cars. Willi Hüsler states, “Cars are true ‘devourers’ of public space”. Each car indeed needs 50m² of road space to be able to circulate.

If we move on foot or by bicycle, on the other hand, we need 2 or 8m², which becomes 10m² if we use public transportation (calculating only the journeys, thus not considering vehicle parking which increases the values exponentially).

These data become interesting for those who want to rethink mobility and improve the city’s public spaces. If it turns towards sustainability and greater inclusiveness of pedestrians, cyclists, and green infrastructures, then the street should ‘make space’.

The streets, the city’s synapses, must be considered a public space network, just like our nervous system, generating new connections between buildings, infrastructures and open spaces.

Moreover, in the growing challenges of the climate emergency, they should be conceived as urban ecosystems, able to provide benefits to citizens as well as non-human stakeholders within an increased and inclusive quality of life.

FFor transport and mobility, the street is the central stage. It is the nervous system of the public space body whereby all central motor functions originate and take place. In essence, streets are about connecting the city.

The denser the network, the more resilient and performant it is, ensuring multiple alternative routes for different users to get from one point to another. As with the human brain, the urban street network works as a totality: one event in one part of the network affects the entire system due to its complex structure.

This is why it is important to ensure that streets do not only respond to users’ desire lines and volume demand in different parts of the city, but that they do so equitably and sustainably. The human brain is capable of adapting itself to respond to new stimuli and behaviors.

A similar kind of flexibility takes place in the urban setting, albeit at a much slower pace. However, in times of emergency and massive mobility disruption, as with the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, the urban organism has shown to adapt much faster to impending needs than under normal circumstances. Though initiated as temporary street adaptations, some of the changes were made permanent as a result of proven functionality and compatibility with contemporary urban needs.

In order to effectively respond to sustainable mobility needs in current and future urban environments, a kind of neural plasticity of the urban street network is needed to ensure that the public space organism continues to connect people instinctively and intelligently.