Pedestrians of the world unite – over malls

Press, 30 July 1980, Page 17

Pedestrians of the world unite - over malls

A new day is dawning for the pedestrian. Footpower has begun to challenge horsepower. World-wide action against the unrestrained use of the motor-car in congested urban areas heralds the arrival of the Pedestrian Revolution.

This is the view of overseas writers about the advent of the pedestrian mall; and this is the context in which the new Cashel Street mall can be considered. DOUGLAS McKENZIE has brought together some of this overseas opinion. The article acknowledges “Streets for People.” by Bernard Rudofsky; and “The Pedestrian Revolution” by Simon Breines and William J. Dean.

Vehicle-free pedestrian areas exist in all the famous cities of the world — London, Paris, New York, Munich, Copenhagen, Rome, Vienna. A section of Warsaw’s old town is set aside for pedestrian use; Leningrad has closed Nevsky Prospect, the city’s main street, to vehicular traffic. Streets without cars are popular in Mexico City. ■The Italians have a name for the restoring of streets to the pedestrian — pedonalizzazione.

In Stockholm, the areas reserved for pedestrian use are called “walking streets”; in Tokyo, “pedestrian paradises.” All this is being called the Pedestrian Revolution, and is evidence of a growing disenchantment with the congestion in towns caused by the motor-car. It can easily be forgotten that cities exist for the cafe and culture of people, not the passage of motor vehicles. Oxford Street, perhaps London’s major shopping thoroughfare, had 300 pedestrian casualties a year until private cars were banned.

After the closing of sections of Munich’s centre to motor vehicles, pedestrian traffic increased by 60 per cent.

Pedestrian malls encourage an increase in walking, inducing beneficial effects. It is believed to be no mere coincidence that between 1930 and 1960, when walking became a lost skill as Americans started to drive in large numbers, deaths from coronary disease increased 2000 per cent in the same period. The car cannot be disinvented; and banning the car entirely in city centres is no answer, Lives are, indeed, enriched by the car. The solution is to exploit the advantages of foot and wheel in their own most suitable areas. The renaissance of the street will not, of course, cure everything that is wrong with cities. But streets are important;' they comprise one-third. of the total area in cities.

“Think of a city and what comes to mind?” asks Jane Jacobs in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” And she answers her own question: “It’s streets. If a city’s streets . look’ interesting, the city looks interesting; if they look dull, the city looks dull.”

Advocates of car-free streets say that people should have the right to walk to work, to school, to shops, under safe, pleasant, and healthy conditions; to converse with friends without the threat or noise or pollution of cars; to escape the summer heat along treeshaded ways; to relax on benches and just look.

Some modern words associated with walking have deep roots in history. In classical Athens, walking was part of the discipline of two philosophical schools — the Peripatetic ("the walking about”) and the Stoic. The latter took their name from “stoa,” meaning “roofed colonnade,” structures built to screen shops and pedestrians from the sun.

The term “mall” has close associations with London. The mall is a wooden mallet, ' and the old game of pall-mall is similar to modern croquet. Mall is also the word for the alleys where the game was played. The. wo rd came to refer to a shaded walk, such as

the Mall in London’s St James’s Park, and, more recently, a pedestrian area, with or without an abundance of shade-pro-ducing trees. In the nineteenth century, horse-drawn vehicles in cities were beginning to cause nbt only congestion but also noise (from the iron-tyred wheels) and smell (from the ■ nature of horses).

The car’s arrival was first greeted with ecstasy. Here was cleanliness and quietness, something occupying less space than the horse and waggon, carrying a much greater load, and moving faster. It seemed to be the answer to urban congestion. But the car Mas itself become the urban congestion. However, it cannot be eliminated now except under closely controlled conditions. “If the auto were to disappear tomorrow,” says an American study, “a large part of the American population would be literally unable to survive, to get to work, even to buy food.”

It is reported that many American suburbs discourage walking by the most effective means known: lack'of pavements. Pavements are believed to tarnish the rural character of suburbia; indeed walking is considered a suspicious activity. Another American idea has grown up to combat this attitude. It takes the view that since no localbody departments are concerned with the rights of the person on the street a Department of Pedestrians should be created, with a Pedestrian Advocate at its head.

The duties of the Pedestrian Advocate would be to identify areas suitable for “pedestrianism;” develop and implement proposals for pedestrian islands and pedestrian districts, working in close consultation with community leaders; and monitor and evaluate pedestrian experiments.

Streets with heavy pedestrian concentrations, accessible by alternative means of transport, are prime candidates for pedestrianism — hence the basis for the growth of shopping malls.

In ‘The Pedestrian Revolution” this passage occurs: “Pedestrianism will not arrive without controversy. Objections will always be raised to the closing of a street, no matter how congested, inconvenient, or unhealthy vehicular traffic may be. Property owners have an instinctive fear of change, Shopkeepers foresee a drop in sales, and some business leaders regard traffic congestion as an indication of economic vitality — ‘lt’s good for us!’ These fears, justified or not, are real, and cannot be ignored.”

“Streets for People” does not greet the advent of pedestrian malls with unrestained joy. It says: “Pedestrian malls (heated ‘malls’ do not qualify as streets; they are buildings)

have come about simply by replacing asphalt by pavements traditionally associated with speeds of two miles an hour or less, and by planting trees right in the middle of the strees, less for their shade than as a heraldic device of the knights battling to redress urban evils.

“The results have proved unmemorable, for the street is not an area but a volume. It cannot exist in a vacuum; it is inseparable from its environment.

“In other words, it is not better than the company of houses it keeps. The viability of the street depends as much on the right kind of architecture as on the right kind of humanity.” Pavement texture and design can be used to enhance greatly the interest

of a walking area. It lends itself to rich work in mosaic.

“There is never a better way of taking in life than walking in the street,” said Henry James. The Italians are famous for this view. To present them with a suitable promenad-

ing ground in the evenings, a town will close its main thoroughfare to all wheeled traffic except prams.

And Paris is praised' as the only one of the large cities that can be comfortably covered on foot, and is dependent for its liveliness on the people who pass by in the streets. The idea of having separate streets for humans and vehicles has occupied many an imaginative mind including, almost inevitably, that of Leonardo da Vinci.

To make town traffic efficient and pleasant for all concerned he foresaw a doubb system of streets — street-level arteries for vehicles of every sort, and elevated streets for pedestrians. He worked out their structure down to the last detail, including rainwater gutters and light shafts for the lower passages.

Once streets are given over to pedestrians, decoration can start. Sometimes this is done through canopies which may have the practical application of deflecting the summer’s sun, or being a rain shelter. Overhead decoration for its own sake may follow, made of string and shredded paper, or of flowers, or of permanent materials such as metal trellises. Market streets in Spain and Morocco have famous examples of this. The enthusiasts say that civilised man should at least once in his lifetime

try the luxury of a stroll in the streets of Greek island towns which have held out against wheeled vehicles. Kithnos, with a population of 15,000 spread over seven towns, until quite recently had no need of vehicles; the only wheels in existence were said to be those used in windmills. But even here there have been changes. If- they are to be kept happy, pedestrians must be fed — without fuss and

preferably not at great cost. The answer is the cafe “underfoot”; and the authentic cafe is almost always part of the street. It represents a stationary version of the promenade — a pedestrian’s depot, so- to speak. Where the climate is right it spreads out over street or square, an extension of the indoor cafe.

In Europe, facilities for sitting in the open air — particularly .an inexhaustible reserve of chairs — are mostly taken for granted; a restaurant or cafe will not succeed if it cannot offer its patrons outdoor space for the better part of the year. Whether open to the winds, or walled in by

glass panels, shaded by trees or awnings, the outdoor cafe allows the customer an unparalleled view of street life. But the cafe is a strictly urban institution; it is rarely found in villages. Of course, eating in the street is not to everybody’s taste. Some people have strong reservations about it; psychologists have likened the act of eating in public to the indecent' exposure of the body.

Every nation gets the cities, and the streets, that it deserves. Jane Addams, sociologist, Nobel Prize winner, and Chicago inspector of streets, says in despair: “Society cares more for the products it manufactures than for the immemorial ability to affirm the charm of existence.” When trains were the

last word in transport nobody protested against their presence on the streets. In due time, however, they were put in their place. “Future generations will marvel at the obtuseness of people who thought nothing of sharing the street with motor-cars,’’ writes Bernard Rudofsky.