Sharing the Beautiful Everyday Journey
The question we set ourselves at the outset of our two-year study was ‘Can cycling infrastructure help improve London’s public realm?’. Our answer is, emphatically, yes; but only if that infrastructure has been designed following these three key principals:
1. From the perspective of an individual’s visual and sensory experience of a journey.
2. Accommodates the ever-changing place and movement functions that our squares, streets and junctions have to perform.
3. Promotes considerate cycling and reduces conflict with vehicles and pedestrians, while still ensuring a journey that is efficient and enjoyable.
The key outcome of this research is the development of a drawn methodology to help urban designers create successful streets, squares and junctions that also function as a positive place of encounter. We have sought to encourage a move away from a modernist bird-eye approach to planning and from the tendency to look at each junction as a technical problem to solve in isolation. Instead the drawn methodology helps designers to understand the city kinetically, from different perspectives, allowing them to curate ‘journeys’ as complex sequences that, unlike the isolated experience of being in a car, incorporates social, aesthetic and physical interactions with the surrounding environment.
Some of the ‘soft/mental’ mapping and spatial strategy tools described in our research are already widely used and recognised. However it is the process of expanding and formalising these tools into a structure that promotes a balanced understanding of the public realm in terms of space, time and movement which we believe will be of lasting value.
As we look to a future where the function of our streets may change radically due to automated technology we should learn lessons from the modernist period and always put the experience of the people at the centre of design and create places that allow beautiful journeys every day.
In late 2015 DSDHA were awarded a two year Built Environment research fellowship by the Royal Commission for the Great Exhibition of 1851, granted in response to a brief highlighting the inadequacy of design standards for cycling infrastructure. The fellowship was supported by Transport for London and consequently used to inform future public realm planning and design. The Commission sought research that would challenge this model by exploring how cities, using London as a case study, might better accommodate cycling and walking in ways that enhance the public realm.
Applicants were asked to look at examples of international best practice, develop design specifications and materials guidelines, and produce evidence-based proposals for high-quality streets, junctions, and public spaces. DSDHA approached this brief by developing a methodology that foregrounds the spatial, temporal, and behavioural dimensions of movement, aiming to create more responsive and human-centred urban environments.