Lab2PT Publications
2023 - the Future Design of Streets
Street life is at the heart of our society. Streets are the foundation of our daily life: providing a spatial platform where people can move and organise many economic and cultural activities. Streets, as elementary urban components, are the basis of our living environment and therefore important spaces to take care of, now and tomorrow. Streets are more than ever social spaces, to meet and to move. Spaces of interactions and conflicts. Spaces for cultural and economic activities. Ecological spaces for flora and fauna. Human spaces that are full of tales, with individual stories and collective memories. Streets are spaces that are – spatially and socially – constructed in time: layer by layer, adding and replacing components, subsystems, changing uses and meanings. Regardless of the urban form and evolution, streets form the main public space in cities, towns, and villages. In urban areas, streets form resilient collective spaces. Streets are adaptable by their ability to integrate new uses and new technologies. New societal, sustainable, and technological demands will affect our streets. It is therefore a challenge to reflect on how streets are being designed. Recently, in addition to conventional street design projects, a new wave of attention and interest led to many hands-on initiatives: interventions with paint and tape showed us that it is not so difficult to change streets. With new actors and more agile manners of intervening, suddenly the impossible became possible. That brings us to the question if our actual practices of street designing are still appropriate? Rather than searching for one standard solution that fits everywhere, it is more about a variety of approaches and models that recognise site specific characteristics, local conditions, and the cultural context. More often it is also about transforming and adapting existing streets to spaces for social activities and green structures, in which new approaches include multiple angles. In relation to that, mobility is one of the main topics, aside social and economic activities, sport and play, water systems, green ecology, climate adaptation, and private plots and buildings.
(Introduction Excerpt, pp. 13-14)
Download: HERE
Daniel Casas-Valle Ivo Oliveira Catarina Breia Dias
José Filipe de Alexandre
Lab2PT
978-989-8963-78-9