The Once and Future Street

I had the privilege of taking renowned architect and new urbanism pioneer, Peter Calthorpe around Metro Manila during his first visit to the Philippines in the early 90s. One of the questions he asked then was, “where is the most beautiful street in Metro Manila?” I was surprised by the question and was even more surprised that I couldn’t readily answer his innocent query.?I wished then that I could take him to Roxas Boulevard with its famous sunset, but realized it was not the street per se that was remarkable (besides, the reclamation of the Bay which was well underway then had diminished the waterfront grandeur of Burnham’s vision for the boulevard). We instead took him to McKinley Road which in the 90s had wider sidewalks, a full canopy of trees arching over a wide 2-lane carriageway and a scenic drive that offered a scenic view of Manila golf (only a chain link fence separated the golf course from the road back then). Picturesque as it was during that time, I retrospectively realized that McKinley Road was quite sterile with the high walls and imposing gates of the grand homes along it. It was impressive to drive through during the day, but unnerving to walk in at night.?It nevertheless functioned the way it was designed--as an elegant arrival to the ultra-exclusive villages that flank it—private, luxurious, distinctive. It was beautiful in its own rarefied way.

The Quest for The Beautiful Street

More than 30 years later, the answer to Peter Calthorpe’s question still eludes me. I’m sure attractive streets abound in various places all over the country and there are a few noteworthy streets in many new developments.??Over the years as a land planner, I sought to design “the beautiful street’. Ultimately, however, the effort was largely technical and visual with most designs ending up within gated and homogenous enclaves, hidden from public view and shielded from collective enjoyment.?

The struggle is in defining what makes a street beautiful; and beautiful for whom? We are in awe of the grand boulevards of Paris or enchanted by the streets of Cotswold, England or admire the hilly streets of San Francisco or charmed by the streets of old town Vigan.?The common thread among these attractive streets is that they are part of the public fabric of the city. A street, therefore, is beautiful because of (or, some may argue, despite) its public nature. Cities have long expressed the public-private dilemma and no other urban element best captures this perplexity than in the street itself.

The street is the most contested element in the built environment: it is a communal space, yet it is also an implicit extension of the private realm, often appropriated by property owners immediately fronting them.?Embedded in the form and function of the street is the constant struggle between public and private that challenge even our very conceptions of what is personal and what is shared. Streets are concurrently, no one’s, each one’s and everyone’s.

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From Public to Private

Pre-modern cultures saw the street as largely a shared good, with a porous boundary between the domestic and communal, using courtyards as transitional elements that sets the hierarchy of “privateness”.?The nature of the street space itself, is defined depending on who is using it at that point in time, whether it is a place to sell merchandise, a path to traverse, or a venue to chat with neighbors or a space for children to play. Its multifunctionality within its limited dimensions lends to constant negotiation for control among its varied users.?One only needs to recall the streets of Divisoria to imagine the chaotic ballet that happens within traditional downtown streets.

The pervasiveness of individualistic and liberal values during modern times shifted our concept of the public realm. The individual began to take precedence over the collective and was reflected in all aspects of life and the built environment.?Personal freedom, independence, privacy, and the self-interested virtues of capitalism became the ideals of society. Individualism, as the philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville once stated, “sapped the virtues of public life”.

The street, and the city, adapted to this individualistic ideal.?Neighborhoods gave way to gated private enclaves segregated by income. Mass mobility gave way to private mobility and the private car became the sought-after symbol of prosperity.?Streets lost their communal purpose and are now designed to serve private vehicles nearly exclusively. The rich complexity of the polyfunctional street as “place” was lost to its “movement” function when it became the exclusive domain of the car. ?Beauty as an ideal for the street was lost to the need to convey ever more vehicles faster and farther. ?Formerly the seams of neighborhoods, streets became the edges of gated communities. With the automobile as a status symbol, the wide village street became the indicator of prestigious address.?One only needs to see the street standards of our building and subdivision codes or to observe the highways and skyways that bisect the sprawling metropolis to observe how much we have prioritized vehicular mobility over all other functions of the street.

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What is the Future of the Street?

So, is the quest for the beautiful urban street a lost cause? Hopefully, not.?The pandemic raised public awareness of the value of the street as a multi-functional space for various mobility modes and place activities. Ironically, there was an apparent resurgence in collectivism during the time of pandemic isolation.

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On one hand, there is a growing movement towards car-free streets, car-free districts, and shared streets.?On the other hand, technology-driven innovations for private mobility such as electric vehicles, self-driving cars are also joining the mainstream.?Any of these trends could define the future of the street but the end state will likely be a hybrid of these possibilities. The struggle between public and private, collective, and individual, will likely persist in the streets of the future.

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Long before the invention of the automobile, streets have played an important role in the social, political, cultural, and economic life of cities.?Mobility was just one of its varied functions. Streets served as economic spaces for shop owners, street vendors, hawkers, and even shady businesses. They were play areas for children and elderly and stages for various gatherings.?Before cars came into being, there was no need for traffic lights or marked crossings.?Pedestrians can cross wherever they wanted, relying on complex visual cues, body language and eye contact to negotiate and weave through the street space among other users in a silent, un-orchestrated, and constant negotiation for space and movement. The slow and uniform speed of all the users allowed for this informal and democratic use of space.

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The issue is speed. Objects moving faster will displace the space occupied by slower objects. This necessitated the segregation of activities and the uneven allocation of space within streets: wide lanes for cars, narrow sidewalks for pedestrians. Places began to be designed for higher speeds: the granularity and intricacy of building facades, signages, plazas and storefronts were lost to bigger masses of buildings and billboards meant to be seen from afar while moving at high speeds. Speed, and its implied freedom, has been promoted by modern society entrenching personal mobility via the automobile as a revered privilege, relegating all other modes as subsidiary to this idea.?And along with this, the relegation of the traditional value of the street as equitable place.

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Technology and the Plight of Streets

The march of technology has furthered this bias for private mobility, creating a car-centric culture and its consequent impact on urbanism.?Some estimate anywhere from 800 million to 2 billion parking slots in the United States (more than the total number of cars in the world!). Add the amount of parking with the roads and highways traversing our cities and you’ll end up with a hefty amount of expensive real estate devoted to cars. ?The lopsided spatial allocation becomes even more glaring when you realize that cars are 80% empty when driven by a single person.?It’s worth mentioning further that in the Philippines, only 6% of households own cars, jeeps, or vans.

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And yet amid the glaring contribution of private transport to congestion and inequity, economic interests continue to promote private mobility through automated vehicles, self-driving cars, and electric vehicles as the response to climate change. What is saddening is with the continued dominance of private mechanical transport, our behavior and attitude towards the street as part of the public realm has also changed.?We have come to accept segregation of modes as the default for road design, putting pedestrians above or below streets just to enable unimpeded motor traffic. Elevated walkways a la the New York Highline have become coveted symbols of contemporary urbanism even if these result in dingy and neglected ground level environments. We have accepted the necessity of travelling within the city on foot but resist giving up the streets for it. Our urban developments have made car travel a priority, and thus even for short distances, we have come to rely on using the car.

An Alternative for Downtown Streets

A few years ago, I was asked by a former colleague on what the best strategy is for reducing vehicular volume in our business districts. I said, “Close the streets”. I wasn’t being sarcastic, but the truth is that many of our city centers simply make it too convenient to travel by automobile even for short distances.

The reality, of course, is that closing streets to vehicles is more a political issue rather than technical. But precedents such as Time Square, Barcelona’s superblocks and many downtowns in cities around the world that now advocate car-free streets show that it is possible.

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While closing streets may be contentions, a middle ground solution can be found and it comes by many names: Wohnstrasse, Woonerf, Play Streets, Shared Streets.?These are “living streets” where the space is shared among pedestrians, bicyclists, and motor vehicles with priority being given to people over cars. The shared street has no clear delineation between users whether pedestrian, cars, or cyclists. The street is sometimes interspersed with trees and benches, so motorists are forced to slow down and navigate the space cautiously, utilizing spatial suggestions and visual cues that are more innate to our mobility instincts.?Particularly beneficial to downtown residential areas, the shared streets establish a uniform speed among users that enable the democratic and equitable use of the space. By eliminating physical definition that segregate movement and activity types, various opportunities for social engagement become possible.?The street becomes a meeting point—a place to go to and not just to go through.

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While it cannot be denied that private cars are an essential need in modern life, good land use planning can reduce our total dependence on them.?There is no need for speed if everything is a short distance away. Mixed use and appropriate urban density can reclaim our streets for people.

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Architect and writer Wytold Rybczynski once asked, “Can we design or construct places that are better suited to deeper human needs and purposes?” We should ask the same question of our streets.?Streets should be more than just for conveyance; they should be more than the foreground of buildings and the pavement for cars. ?Streets should serve their fundamental purpose, which is to connect, and do so in as many ways as possible—physical, social, economic. After all, streets like all successful urban environments, should be places where people want to be and where they choose to be.

Originally published as a two-part article in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, January and February 2023