liveable cities

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Street Screen – the best of the Streetfilms archive

Streetfilms showcase – 7pm, Friday 6th June at Hackney Picture House, Mare Street, E8

Join us and Hackney Council on the evening of 6th June as we delve into the archive of Streetfilms – an inspiring showcase of projects and places from around the world, from the cycle friendly streets of Groningen to San Francisco via Copenhagen, Bogota, New York and more.

New York based Streetfilms have been producing short films showing how smart public realm design produces better places to live, work and play since 2006. They have become the go-to organisation for films on liveable streets, with over 8 million views of the 600 films in their archive

Tickets for the 90 minute screening are just £5 – available here. The entry price includes a post-screening drink courtesy of Steer Davies Gleave.

 

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Street Talks, 22nd January – The quick, the cheap and the temporary

The quick, the cheap and the temporary: Speeding up the transformation of London’s streets and public spaces 

6.30pm, Wednesday 22nd January at The Gallery, 70 Cowcross Street, EC1M 6EJ – in partnership with Sustrans London

Is it time London learnt to loosen up and lighten up in its approach to the design and delivery of cycle infrastructure and other public realm improvements?

Over the last few years New York has been rapidly reclaiming street space for pedestrians and cyclists using little more than ‘paint and planters.’ Temporary and pilot projects are now being refined, adapted and made permanent. Should London be doing the same?

We hope you can join us for the first Street Talks of 2014 when our panel of speakers will explore the potential for quick, cheap and temporary projects to speed up the transformation of London’s streets and public spaces:

  • Hannah Padgett from Sustrans will explain how the Pocket Places project in Peckham is using temporary and semi-permanent interventions to transform unused spaces along Rye Lane and stimulate debate about the future of this important local high street;
  • Brian Deegan, who pioneered ‘light segregation’ for cycle lanes on Royal College Street, Camden and is one of the authors of Transport for London’s new Cycle Design Standards will consider the importance of adaptability when delivering cycle infrastructure; and
  • Hackney Council’s Ben Kennedy will present a series of case studies at a range of scales – from on-street cycle lockers to a pilot project to test the potential for pedestrianising the Narrow Way on Mare Street.
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Street Talks with Ben Addy – DIY Streets, 2nd July

Street Talks with Ben Addy, London Communities Manager, Sustrans  – DIY Streets

In an age of austerity and localism Sustrans DIY Streets projects allow communities to develop affordable solutions to make their streets safer and more attractive places to live. The DIY Streets project in Haringey, which ran from 2010 – 2012, led to a 10% average reduction in traffic volume at monitoring sites; a 23% increase in traffic travelling 20mph or less; a 61% increase in residents who felt the street was attractive and a 34% increase in residents who felt the street is place to socialise.

We hope you can join us for July’s Street Talks when Ben Addy, who leads Sustrans DIY Streets work in London, will explore how local residents and other partners can work together to create high quality urban environments that promote sustainable travel and are safe and pleasant to live in and visit.

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm on Tuesday 2nd July 2013 (bar open from 6pm).

Ben Addy is the London Communities Manager with Sustrans.  He is responsible for managing the Communities projects in London – including DIY Streets and Pocket Places. Prior to his current role, Ben delivered a two-year DIY Streets project in Turnpike Lane, London Borough of Haringey. Ben has an MA International Studies from the University of Denver and has extensive experience working on social justice projects and campaigns in both Europe and North America.

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Second annual Hackney Cycling conference, 6th June

We’re delighted to be supporting the second annual Hackney Cycling Conference which is being held on Thursday 6th June at Hackney Town Hall.

The conference will explore the potential to turn recent high level political support for cycling, ambitious policy statements and successful campaigns into real change on the ground and create conditions that encourage a significant increase in the number of people riding bikes.

Speakers include:

  • Jules Pipe, Mayor of Hackney
  • Andrew Gilligan, London Cycling Commissioner
  • Prof. Phil Goodwin, University of the West of England and author of the APPCG report ‘Get Britain Cycling’
  • Dr Adrian Davis, Bristol City Council on the Bristol model for collaboration on public health and transport
  • Prof. Harry Rutter, Public Health England and Halsa Consulting on cycling risks and benefits
  • Chris Procter, Design and Engineering Manager at Hackney Council on the principles of permeability
  • Sophie Tyler, The Means on cycling and retail
  • Oliver Schick, London Cycling Campaign in Hackney on building local support for road space reallocation
  • The Canal and River Trust on managing shared space on Greenways
  • Mark Strong, Transport Initiatives on designing for different kerb-side needs

Hackney Town Hall, Assembly Halls, Mare St (entrance from Reading Lane), E8 1EA, Thursday 6th June, 9am-4pm.

You can register to attend and find more information here (registration fee £25).

The Hackney Cycling Conference is organised by Hackney Council and supported by London Cycling Campaign in Hackney, Movement for Liveable London, Transport Initiatives, SKM Colin Buchanan.

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Street Talks with Cllr Vincent Stops and Trevor Parsons, 4th June

Street Talks with Cllr Vincent Stops, Hackney Council and Trevor Parsons, London Cycling Campaign in Hackney – Hackney: Lessons from London’s most liveable borough

Many different factors – topographical, historical, economic, social, demographic and political – have contributed to the borough of Hackney becoming arguably the most liveable in London. We hope you can join us for Street Talks in June when Trevor Parsons and Vincent Stops will explore these factors, outline the many problems and constraints which still remain, and discuss strategies for overcoming them.

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm on Tuesday 4th June 2013 (bar open from 6pm).

Vincent Stops has been a councillor in Hackney for 11 years. For two he was the lead member responsible for transport, streets and environment issues. For the last seven he has been the Chair of Planning. During all that time Vincent has promoted the benefits of a great public realm, great built environment and the importance of bus, cycle and walking. Vincent has worked in transport policy for several years.

Trevor Parsons lives in Hoxton and tinkers with computers. He became involved in his local London Cycling Campaign group when it appealed for help in the struggle against the building of the M11 Link Road. He has remained active at the borough level ever since, and claims the first use of the word ‘permeability’ in relation to planning for cycling.

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Playing Out in Hackney

Photo: Hackney Council

Photo: Hackney Council

A guest article by Jono Kenyon.

People are constantly amazed when I mention I live on the same road I grew up on. Something about London seems alien to the concept. Either you grew up here, then promptly upped sticks the moment you had a family, or you moved here at some point in life. For me, fate and luck brought me back to the same street I played on as a boy. Many of the local roads adjacent to Seven Sisters Road were closed off to through traffic in the early eighties to curb prostitution. This was an incredibly successful strategy, and it also led to a better street environment.  My brother and I played in the street regularly, despite there being the huge Finsbury Park less than 100 metres away.

So here we are, 20 years later, and things have changed. It’s rare to see children playing in front of their houses with other kids from the street. Children are spending more time indoors or being shepherded from one structured activity to the next.  In many parts of London, people don’t know their next door neighbours, let alone any other families on their street. I often wondered whether we could ever rekindle the old sense of community and see children out playing as I used to.  Then two things happened.  We had a street party, instigated by some neighbours we had never met, and I read a piece in the Guardian about a scheme called ‘Playing Out’, started in Bristol, aimed at encouraging street play. It struck a chord with me. We want our children to trust the space outside our home. We want them to get to know the people we live near, not just next door to.  We would like to generate a sense of community, rather than waiting for one to magically come about.  At the street party, we found many people that we live amongst, but had never met, who felt the same way.

So what stops us from just opening our doors and letting the kids roam free? Cars. Despite the gates, vehicles continue to travel in a fashion unlikely to encourage kids to play naturally in the street. Drivers just don’t expect to encounter anyone or anything on the 200-metre zip up the road.  Playing Out offered a way to begin to take back some ownership of the space outside our homes.

Essentially the idea is to formally close a street to through traffic to allow children to play.  Giving children the freedom to play in the street allows them to form relationships with kids they don’t go to school with.  Younger children can bond with older ones too. Unstructured playtime allows children the opportunity to gain independence from their parents.  Kids make up their own games with their own rules and ultimately resolve their own conflicts without adult interference.  In addition, Playing Out helps to develop a sense of community in the street. We had a lot of support, not just from the parents of children playing, but also from childless and elderly neighbours.  Our experience of other sessions elsewhere in Hackney was that many people simply came out to have a cup of tea and a chat with others.

So how did we organise the first of our 12 playing out sessions this year? I attended an evening workshop given by Alice Ferguson, who co-created the Playing Out concept. The workshop outlined why Playing Out was a good idea, and ran through the procedures required to get it going. Our road had a great head start as two other neighbours came to the workshop. The three of us got together and began the process. A great deal of the groundwork had been done by others including local resident Claudia Le Sueur Draper who had organised with Hackney council to facilitate the sessions. The council were encouraged to start a 12 month trial to allow the granting of temporary road closures for street play, or TPSO.

We leafleted the whole street to introduce the idea and find more support. We then had to go through a formal consultation process, notifying all residents of our intended 2-hour road closures. Once that was completed, Hackney supplied us with formal notices and some ‘Road Closed’ signage. Volunteers strung up bunting across each end of the street and stewarded these entry-points, slowly escorting through any residents’ cars and turning away all other traffic.

Our first session was for 2 hours last Sunday, and was great, albeit cold! What struck me was how little encouragement the kids need. We didn’t need to worry about them being bored at all. As soon as the barriers went out, it was ‘game on’. Neighbours came out to offer cups of tea and home-baked treats.

Ultimately, I would like the formal side of Playing Out to fade away in our street, as well as neighbouring ones. I would like the 6 roads that make up our network here, to become a safe zone for street play. It would be nice for cars entering residential streets across the UK to know that children may well be in the road, and should take priority.

Lots of information is available on the Playing Out website.

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A new movement for The New City – Bruce McVean’s The New City lecture

This is a write up of Bruce McVean’s The New City lecture given on Monday 11th February 2013 at Cambridge University’s Department of Architecture.

A brief (and over simplified) history of transport and the city

Cities have always been shaped by transport, while the planning and design of cities impacts on transport choices. The first cities were inherently walkable – the primary mode of transport was people’s feet and cities were necessarily compact in size and form as a result.

Public transport allowed cities to grow well beyond a size that would allow a person to comfortably walk from one side to the other. The expansion of train, tram, bus and tube lines helped suburbia spread, but the component parts of suburban growth remained walkable – homes needed to be within walking distance of train stations, tram stops, bus routes, shops and services. Today we’d say that cities were expanding through ‘transit orientated development’.

Mass private transport came in the form of the bicycle, which enabled people to travel further for journeys not served by public transport, bringing new personal freedom of movement that helped whet the appetite for the even greater freedoms promised by the car.

Aspirations towards car ownership were matched with aspirations towards home (and garden) ownership. After the Second World War rising car ownership freed developers from the need to provide easy access to public transport. Shops and services no longer needed to be within walking distance. Aggressive lobbying by car manufacturers, government investment in road building, and changes in planning policy and development economics all helped fuel the rise of the car as the transport mode of choice.

Now those who live in suburbia have little choice but to drive – trapped in a vicious cycle of car dependency as the separation of land uses continues to place jobs and services beyond the reach of those on foot, while low densities make the running of decent public transport nigh on impossible – and most people looking for a new home have little choice but to buy in suburbia.

Of course, it wasn’t just suburbia that was being shaped by the car. In existing urban areas perfectly functional buildings and even neighbourhoods disappeared under the wrecking ball to provide the road and parking space necessary to bring the car into the heart of the city.

The problem with cars

The negative impacts of our love affair with the car have long been acknowledged. As have the difficulties of trying to do anything meaningful to address them. In 1960 the Ministry of Transport commissioned a team led by Colin Buchanan to look at the problem, resulting in the publication of Traffic in Towns in 1963. 50 years on the project steering group’s famous acknowledgement that, “We are nourishing at immense cost a monster of great destructiveness. And yet we love him dearly…” still rings true.

Undoubtedly many people still aspire to car ownership, or view owning a car as essential to maintaining a high quality of life. And who are we to deny them? Engines keep getting more efficient and electric cars will help wean us off carbon dioxide emitting toxic fossil fuels. What about those self-driving cars we keep hearing so much about? Aren’t they going to use road space so efficiently that congestion will be a thing of the past, along with crashes? Perhaps, but what kind of city do we want to live in? One where everyone zooms about in their own metal box, completely removed from their fellow citizens? Ask anyone how they think their city can be improved and the answer is unlikely to be more cars – self-driving or otherwise.

Technology may soon address the problems of the internal combustion engine and the contribution that car travel makes to carbon emissions and air pollution; but technology alone can’t solve the myriad of other negative impacts of car dependency that are neatly summarised in the diagram below from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution’s report The Urban Environment. Tackling carbon emissions and air pollution is an essential task, but it’s not the only task – the big villain isn’t the internal combustion engine, it’s the car. As Taras Grescoe argues in Straphanger, “The automobile was never an appropriate technology for [cities]. As a form of mass transit for the world, it is a disaster.”

Continue reading →

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January’s Street Talk

Christian Wolmar – From good to great? How to use transport policies to turn London into a liveable city

We hope you can join us for the first Street Talks of 2013 when we’ll be joined by Christian Wolmar, leading commentator and author on transport issues. Christian’s talk will explore how changes in transport policy could help turn London into a more liveable city.

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm on Tuesday 8th January (bar open from 6pm).

Christian Wolmar is an award-winning writer and broadcaster specialising in transport and is the author of a series of books on railway history. In the autumn of 2012, he announced he is seeking the Labour candidacy for the 2016 London mayoral election. He is a frequent speaker at conferences and events, and regularly appears on TV and radio. In 2011 he was the captain of the Warwick team of graduates in Christmas University Challenge, which reached the final of the competition.

Christian has spent nearly all of his working life as a journalist, and his interest in transport began at The Independent when he was appointed transport correspondent in 1992. Although he mainly concentrates on transport matters, he has covered many other social policy issues and writes regularly for a wide variety of publications including newspapers such as The Times and The Guardian – he has written for every national newspaper except the Star – and numerous magazines. He broadcasts frequently on radio and TV and is a regular pundit on the national news. Among his TV appearances, he has featured on Coast, Julia Bradbury’s Railway Walks and the railway programmes presented by Ian Hislop and Michael Portillo.

Christian is a member of the board of London Cycling Campaign with a special interest in intermodal transport and uses his bicycle as his principal means of transport around London.

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November’s Street Talk

Mark Ames, editor of ibikelondon: I bike, you bike, we bike – cycling towards an equal city

Mark Ames has been writing about cycling for four years and in that time has seen everything from tens of thousands of cyclists on the streets in demonstrations to an old aged pensioner riding the notorious Elephant and Castle roundabout. He’ll chart the highs and lows of cycle advocacy in London and propose new ideas as to what really needs to be done to achieve a real cycling revolution in London, and more importantly who needs to ask for it. Finally, Mark will put forward the idea that keeping cyclists safe and designing the built environment go hand in hand, and, when done well are a true indicator of an equal city.

Mark Ames is the editor of i b i k e l o n d o n and a sustainable urban travel advocate. He was instrumental in organising mass participation bike rides in 2011 on Blackfriars Bridge and around the 10 most dangerous junctions for cyclists in London. In 2012 he fired the starting gun for the ‘Love London, Go Dutch Big Ride’ setting off 10,000 cyclists calling for roads in London to be made as safe for cycling as they are in the Netherlands. He’s appeared on television, online and in print talking about bicycle safety and in 2012 was invited to Oxford University and the Houses of Parliament to talk about everyday and ordinary cycling.

Upstairs at The Yorkshire Grey, 2 Theobalds Road, WC1X 8PN at 7pm (bar open 6pm) on Tuesday 6th November.