Exploring Everyday Streets
Part 2:
The form and use of everyday streets
Birgit Hausleitner, Jane Clossick and Agustina Martire
Everyday streets facilitate various activities and movements, both indoors and outdoors. The second section of this book addresses the following question: What is the relationship between the urban form of everyday streets and the activities that occur on them? Each chapter describes this relationship as well as the spatial forms, features and uses that make up everyday streets. In all of the considered cases, ongoing urban transformations underpin the visualised processes, adding a temporal layer. Andre Corboz (1983) calls this a ‘palimpsest’ – a reflection of the understanding of urban form as a process shaped by its site and social processes and the understanding that, in turn, spatial form builds the conditions for social processes. This section explores the spatial qualities of everyday streets in Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, Austria, India and the UK. This introduction begins with an outline of the key morphological mechanisms that underpin everyday streets. It then outlines the themes addressed by the chapters in this section: walkability and pedestrian prioritisation, the accommodation of social and economic change, urban depth, and site significance.
About Birgit Hausleitner
Birgit Hausleitner is an architect and urbanist, lecturer and researcher in the Urban Design section in the Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. Her research comprises work on urban diversity and mixed-use cities, focusing on the multi-scalar and configurational aspects of urban conditions that facilitate, introduce or improve combinations of living and working.
About Agustina Martire
Agustina Martire is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Queen’s University Belfast. She specialises in the study of everyday streets and their fabric, histories and experiences. She is especially interested in the way people experience the built environment, and how design can enable a more inclusive and just urban space. She has worked in schools of architecture in Buenos Aires, Delft, Dublin and Belfast and collaborates with a range of government and non-government organisations.
About Jane Clossick
Jane Clossick is an urbanist, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, course leader for MA Architecture, Cities and Urbanism and studio leader for the Cities Unit in MArch Architecture at the School of Art, Architecture and Design at London Metropolitan University.