Review: The Street: A Quintessential Social Public Space

The Street: A Quintessential Social Public Space by Vikas Mehta ventures into an area that has been overlooked by many urban designers. He tries to find a path to get our main streets back to their past glory. The author uses several methods in order to accomplish this task. He uses his own experiences as a user of the street, interviews from other users of the street, as well as field observations to come to his conclusions. Using these three different methods to triangulate the results make for a robust analysis of the main street.

The book starts off with a description of what urban space is and outlines the scope of the research. The different images of the street are put forth, and visual images and cultural, social, and emotional meanings are explored primarily through a review of the literature. Defining the street by the major purpose that it performs, Mehta provides a historical account of the changing uses and significance of the street over time, starting with Khirokitia in south Cyprus in the sixth millennium bc to the contemporary streets. The author then shifts his focus from the specific streets to the more general public space and defines his area of study, focusing on the degree of sociability of a street that engages people around the clock. Also, the focus on the type of activity that people engage in is limited to stationary activities, which the author defines as any activity that requires people spending some time on the street and not merely passing by. Some examples of stationary activity would include sitting on or standing by the benches on the side of the street, engaging in a conversation, observing the surroundings, etc., therefore excluding nonstationary behavior where people merely pass through without stopping.

The book incorporates everyday behavior of people as a means of designing these public spaces. By delving into the fields of environmental and ecological psychology, proxemics, and personal distance, Mehta uses human behavior to come up with design solutions.

The use of several different fields of study as well as human behavior is significant because architects, urban designers, and planners are used to focusing on anthropometric studies, artistic designs, and obsessing on form and function to create and re-create spaces where human beings interact. By moving out of the expected comfort zone and exploring how people actually use space, Mehta adds great value to the process of developing people spaces that rely heavily on his experience as a user of the space, observing others over an extended period of time, as well as explicitly surveying people who use the space or provide and care for the spaces. The thorough study of the street using the three methods provides a way to observe what works and what does not in a real-life street setting and may therefore lead to a successful design of a street. According to the author, the success of the streets can be measured by observing whether the street design supports and encourages people to conduct stationary activities along the street or not—whether the street caters to the needs of people, not the whim or assumption of the urban designer.

Studying Massachusetts Avenue in the Central Square neighborhood in the city of Cambridge, Harvard Street in the Coolidge Corner neighborhood in the town of Brookline, and Elm Street in the Davis Square neighborhood in the city of Somerville, all in the Boston metropolitan area, the author zeroes in on subsections of each of these streets by subdividing them into blocks. This approach allows for a more detailed examination of what works in certain parts and what does not work in others along the same stretch. The similarity in available facilities, like access to public transportation; commercial establishments along the streets; urban design features like buildings built to the sidewalks; historic streets with a mix of new and old; local and national chain shops; land use with a mix of retail on one side of a building and residential on the other solidifies the comparison and contrasts.

The author observes the users of the street space engaged in lasting social behavior, which includes people enjoying their coffee, children playing along the sidewalks, or on street furniture and people’s overall engagement in stationary activities. The author finds that the degree of pedestrian friendliness of the street, measured in terms of safety, environmental comfort, and physical comfort, such as seating arrangement present along the sidewalk, makes a difference to whether people use the space or not. However, this ultimately depends on the type of activity that occurs at the commercial end. The coffee shop, which by its very nature encourages people to relax, socialize, and slow down, was observed to be the type of activity that was most conducive to the kind of stationary use of space that the author observed. The coffee shop was open late and encouraged people to use the space outside it by placing street furniture. But in other instances, places where people would like to pause and socialize were not designed or equipped to encourage stationary behavior because of lack of street furniture, nooks and corners, or shades and canopies, such as public spaces near financial service providers.

Mehta concludes that in order to make the streets public in the true sense of the word, urban design has to merge with collaborative planning efforts to make sure that users truly receive what they need and want. The first set of specific remedies to the ailing street are provided in the form of design and management policies to encourage gathering that includes improving access, reducing traffic, accommodate seating, increasing the width of sidewalks, providing shelters from the elements, and making the street safe through proper lighting. The second set of remedies focuses on making the street attractive to users by accommodating needs of children, the elderly, the homeless, and in general trying to be as inclusive as possible without spurning away people. Mehta suggests supporting the existing vibrant places and creating new ones, by promoting diversity of uses along the streetscape, personalizing the street front to make it much more penetrable and therefore interesting to pedestrians, passers-by, or casual observers to encourage gathering and increased use of the public space. By promoting the greater use of the space by both customers and noncustomers of businesses on the streets, the street allows for ownership and maintenance by the public as well as the private businesses.

The book contributes to the existing scholarship about public space and streets. It is a good text for urban design graduate students and also for practicing community planners. Overall, the book is very easy to read. It is a well-researched case study of three main streets in the Boston metropolitan area that sheds light on some of the problems facing our public social spaces.

However, the book falters a bit in collecting information from the field and transferring it to the broader framework of open spaces in the entire nation as well as globally. The street sections are all from the same region and provide insight into the behavior of the people living there. People’s perceptions and behaviors vary widely across geography, and it is unclear how the results or insights gained from this study could be applicable to other areas. The absence of cost considerations for designing and maintaining such public spaces is another drawback, since many good plans are abandoned because of lack of available funding. Cost being such an important factor in decision-making processes, its omission seems to be unfortunate and makes the study incomplete. Also, the underlying assumption of the author “if we build it, they will come” may not hold true in this day and age. With increasing influence of technology and online shopping experiences, it remains to be seen whether good design is good enough for breathing life into contemporary social space. But, as the author rightly notes, public space needs to provide not just the products but also services and experiences that could make these spaces places of interest and interaction.