A guest article from Julie Holck

In order to understand cities properly, we have to look at them through retail. Retail and urban life have always been two sides of the same coin and although shops alone cannot create a city, retail is a crucial part of urban life. Thousands of cities have been founded on market places and retail has been one of the most powerful drivers in the development of civilisation.

Shops attract people and thereby life – without customers they wouldn’t exist – but they do it in different ways. According to their size, location, structure, values and aesthetics, stores create different kinds of life and different kinds of cities. Shops are ‘mini worlds’, potentially framing experiences, enchantment, surprises and dialogue. Everyday conversations between retailers and customers can create confidence between people and establish a kind of local pride as well as a sense of place.

But shops can also do the opposite, providing homogeneity, boredom and unattractiveness. They can destroy the inner urban structures and suck the life out of the city streets.

Being aware of the consequences of shops is essential when dealing with urban planning on any scale. If we want not only liveable but also lovable cities we need a life generating retail structure and a counter strategy to today’s challenges – which involve the closure of more and more individual stores, the increasing number of chain stores and the growth in store scale.

The concrete situation is that we see more and more towns with very few or no shops at all. When the last grocery shop closes down, so does the town.

Every year 2000 individual food stores go out of business in the UK and the same goes for a number of other Western countries. When that happens, the city loses a little bit of its character. And every time a shop closes we lose a destination in the city. Eventually we lose reasons to go out and thereby we lose people and life in the streets.

While the individual shops go out of business, the chain stores continue to go in. Chain stores look the same everywhere (that’s kind of the point!), but it’s not necessarily a pretty sight – at least it’s not a very interesting sight, as you’ve probably seen it all before. The result, in the end, is that we can hardly distinguish one high street from the other. When the chain stores go marching in, those qualities of chance, the unpredictable and the unusual, which has always given cities their renewable, variable, cosmopolitan, living character, is lost.

Parallel to this we can observe how shopping centers still attract loads of customers. Shopping centres are comfortable and predictable and protect us from bad weather and other inconveniences of the real world (such as beggars, activists, litter and traffic). But although they do attract a lot of customers, who might also sneak out to do some shopping in the streets, aesthetically their contribution to the living city is rather small. Turning their back to the city, they only show the passer-by their huge, enclosed facades. Looked upon as identity makers and street life generators, shopping centres (and chain stores) don’t score very highly. No matter how spectacular the design, they just don’t provide a feeling of place.

Cities (especially in Northern Europe) have been craving for identity for decades. Every city wants to be unique and those who can afford it build beautiful museums and expensive apartments. And that’s fine, but it’s not enough. It’s not the museums that create the everyday buzz of the city; shops do that.

Shops provide an important social and sensuous space and in order to create a living city, it’s crucial to nurse and encourage a unique retail environment with a certain amount of smaller, individual stores. The right shops in the right location function as strong place makers for cities that are or want to be: ALIVE.

Case studies: Jaegersborggade and Vaernedamsvej, Copenhagen

Jaegersborggade Farmers Market from oproerframaven.dk

In Copenhagen a street called Jaegersborggade has changed dramatically within the last 10 years, thanks to the residents’ retail initiatives. From being a gloomy and unattractive place, the home of a motorcycle gang, the street is now a hip and rather unique shopping and leisure destination with small designer shops, famous chefs’ restaurants and a weekly organic market. The residents decided to rent out – to a low rent – all the ground floor/basement spaces to unique shops and eateries and the result is clear today. Jaegersborggade has become a very attractive street and lively, especially on Saturdays. The board of the housing cooperatives is in charge of the renting procedures and decides who to host.

Vaernedamsvej by Normann-Foto.com

In another street, Vaernedamsvej (200 m.), known as Copenhagen’s “little Paris” (very little!) we find 46 different shops/eateries and only 6 of them are part of a chain. There is a special relation between the owners here, and the street makes up a small local community in the middle of the big city. The long history of the street as a shopping street but also the small spaces may be part of the answer to why this is so. There is no formal programme for the street but it has, somehow, found an order of its own, thanks to the social relations and the agreed upon aim of creating/maintaining a special atmosphere with unique shops, focusing on food and fashion.

Low rents, small spaces (rooms), some kind of substance/image consensus and a certain degree of self-determination seem to be constructive in the creation of lively and attractive (shopping) streets.

Julie Holck is a retail consultant for Gehl Architects and has recently completed a PhD on the relationship between cities and retail. Her dissertation, ‘The Shops and the Living Cities’ focuses on how shops contribute to living cities, including reflections on the definition of ‘a living city’, why they are important to us – both socially, culturally and economically – and how we can create alternative and sustainable urban shopping environments.

A guest article from David Arditti

We know there is a particular problem with cycling in outer London. We know this from the figures. While the cycling modal share (proportion of all trips) in Hackney, the highest-cycling  London borough, is 6%, for Bromley it is only 0.5%, and for 18 of the other outer London boroughs it is below 2%. This is not to say that cycling is absolutely high in inner London. Dutch cities have cycling modal shares between 20% and 60% – so even Hackney has nothing particularly to boast of on the European scale. But it has been the case that, while cycling has undergone a significant revival in inner London in the last four decades, it has stagnated or declined in outer London; the “Cycling Revolution” proclaimed by Boris Johnson (which was in fact occurring in inner London long before his mayoralty) has not touched the suburbs.

The borough of Brent is a particularly interesting case, running from within easy cycling distance of central London, in the dense suburbs of Queens Park and Kilburn, to the very different environment of semi-detached, big-garden, rail-commuting “Metroland” in places like Wembley and Kingsbury. Figures for the proportion of people cycling to work for the different wards of Brent show a huge variation, from 4.2% in Queens Park to 0.5% in Kenton. In such places as Kenton, cycling may be said to have fallen to a level of mere “noise” in the transport background: no longer a significant element of transport at all, the 0.5% probably represents an irreducible minimum level of people temporarily trying cycling for a while, before giving it up again owing the hostility of the environment.

While people who live in outer London and work in central London might not be expected to commute to work by bike in significant numbers, given the efficiency of rail services, it should also be borne in mind that most workers in the outer boroughs do not now commute to the centre. Outer London has developed strong local economies and associated travel patterns between residential areas and local town centres, and many of the resulting commutes could be easily cycled, but are not, because cycling is not felt to be an attractive option. In addition, there are a great many other short journeys that outer Londoners make, for shopping, leisure, and particularly school trips, and other journeys that children may make, that could easily be cycled, if conditions were right. But for the whole of Brent, shockingly, cycling only accounts for 0.3% of journeys to school.

To make cycling a viable option for the very high number of short trips that outer Londoners make, we need to look hard at what has been shown to work to increase cycling in urban environments of similar density in other countries, in particular, the high-cycling countries of Europe: the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, Finland, Switzerland and Austria, which give the closest parallels to our culture and human, physical and economic geography. In so doing, we need to be evidence-driven, and to throw out the “witchcraft” approach to promoting cycling which has for so long dominated thinking on the subject in the UK. By “witchcraft”, I mean all those traditional ideas about training people to cycle in a vehicular manner to fit in with a motor-dominated environment (known as Cyclecraft or Bikeability), the emphasis on propaganda through “encouragement” and “awareness-raising” that forms such a large part of local authorities’ cycling strategies, and the emphasis on protection and visibility for cyclists (helmets and dayglow) and on telling cyclists to stay out of the way of lorries. Forty years of promoting such ideas have resulted in the virtual death of cycling in the suburbs.

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A guest article from Eleanor Besley, Policy Advisor, Sustrans

Here at Sustrans we’re cooking up some exciting plans which will help us to show how our work, which aims to get more people out and about on foot and by bike, can help London to achieve the wide range of complex objectives it faces. Over the next few months, one of our key focuses will be on air quality.

We’re kindly being supported by the Campaign for Clean Air in London, AEA and Mapping for Change and working in association with the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, Environmental Protection UK and the Healthy Air Campaign on an initiative which seeks to monitor the levels of Nitrogen Dioxide (NO₂) on London Greenways and compare them to alternative and comparable routes on busy and main roads. We will tie-in the beginning of the process (the placing of NO₂ monitoring ‘boxes’) with the World Environmental Health Day, being developed by the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, taking place on 26^th September 2011 and have invited London politicians, stakeholders, volunteers, supporters and others to come along to a short information session on the day.

Of all emissions and pollutants, NO₂ is the cheapest and easiest to measure at a local level with volunteers and other non-specialists helping us. NO₂ is also a good marker for other pollutants in the air – where there are high concentrations of NO₂ we often find high concentrations of other air pollutants such as PM_10. We’re working on a project which we hope will show just how important it is for London to continue to develop its growing network of greenways in order to offer people a cleaner and healthier alternative to walking and cycling on very busy routes.

Greenways are safe, quiet routes through parks, green spaces and lightly trafficked streets. They are designed to connect people on foot or bike, whatever their ability or purpose, to facilities, parks and open spaces. Our monitoring has shown that greenways often help underrepresented groups overcome the barriers to active travel. Across all of London for example, Two thirds of frequent cyclists (those who cycle once a week or more often) and more than half of infrequent cyclists are men whilst on the Ravensbourne Park greenway, women made up over 52% of users.

As part of our quality of life manifesto for transport in the capital, Sustrans want to achieve a ‘greater’ Greater London. As London expands, it is essential that policy reacts to meet increasingly complex demands and growing inequality, alongside a focus on tackling congestion, air quality and childhood obesity. In our manifesto for London we have called for increased funding for the development of London Greenways which enable new, nervous and inexperienced groups to get out on foot and by bike.

Air quality seems to improve in London as one’s distance increases from the centre of the city and from main roads. Thus, even a small separation from cars has been found to be of benefit, especially when created by physical barriers. The preliminary results of ongoing research suggest that bike lanes are best when built at least one block from a major traffic artery. The chances are extremely high that air quality on Greenways will be better than on main roads. We want to know how much better the Greenways are for people and hope that the work we’re about to start will further encourage new and inexperienced groups to start walking and cycling whilst also helping the mayor to achieve his objectives as outlined in the  Air Quality Strategy.

If you’d like to know more about the work we’re doing on air quality or about our policy work here in London more generally then please get in touch.