STREETS
ample and clean; on each side of which there are magnificent fabrics’.8 The streets are the formal, military routes – an extension of the regional roads leading to the city. Palladio concentrates on military routes, and as for the other city streets, ‘. . . the more they shall be like them, the more they’ll be commended’.9 DEFINITIONS So far in this chapter several terms such as, street, path, avenue, highway, way, route, have been used almost interchangeably. It would be possible to extend this list to include other words such as, road, boulevard, mall and promenade, which have similar meanings. Without going into too great a discussion of definitions, for the purpose of this chapter the main distinction to be made is between road and street. Road is at once an act of riding on horseback and an ordinary line of communication between different places, used by horses, travellers on foot or vehicles. Or it is any path, way or course to some end or journey. The emphasis is on movement between places, the principle lines of communication between places – a two-dimensional ribbon, running on the surface of the landscape, carried over it by bridge or beneath by tunnel. A street may have these attributes, but its more common meaning is a road in a town or village, comparatively wide as opposed to a lane or alley. More importantly it is a road, that is the linear surface along which movement occurs between the adjacent houses – ‘it runs between two lines of houses or shops,’ says a dictionary definition.10 For the purpose of this analysis the street will be taken as an enclosed, three-dimensional space between two lines of adjacent buildings. One particular feature of the road or the thoroughfare which is incompatible with the street is the movement of fast-moving or heavy traffic with all its engineering requirements. It was probably the elevation of the functional needs of vehicular traffic
to a design dogma by avant-garde members of the Modern Movements in architecture and city planning which contributed to the neglect of the street and its architecture. Le Corbusier is one of the main offenders: ‘Our streets no longer work. Streets are an obsolete notion. There ought not to be such a thing as streets; we have to create something that will replace them.’ Later he said: ‘No pedestrian will ever again meet a high-speed vehicle.’11 It is possible to agree with the latter statement without accepting the former. The conception of the city as a product of urban functions dominated by transport deprives the street of its role, or meaning and such functional analyses leave the urban street without an existence or a reason for being. When traffic moves at speed it cannot be accommodated within a street but that does not eliminate the utility of the street nor does it necessarily preclude the use of the street for vehicular traffic. FUNCTIONS OF THE STREET The Athens Charter, resulting from the Congres’ Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (ClAM) meeting in Athens in 1933, crystallized the theory of the Modern Movement in architecture and town planning. The ideas of the great men of the first half of the twentieth century – Le Corbusier, Gropius, Jacobus Oud and others – were revealed to the urbanist as the dogma of rationalism. In the 1950s this preoccupation with function, structure, standardization was challenged and ideas about human association and the softer social aspects of urban planning and architecture given greater emphasis. Peter and Alison Smithson were among those in the forefront of this movement usually associated with Team 10, a group within CIAM. One outcome of this change in thinking among some architect-urbanists was the rehabilitation of the street as a legitimate element of civic design. The Smithsons wrote: ‘In a tight knit society inhabiting a tight knit development such as the Byelaw Streets 129