Streets and Patterns

by Stephen Marshall

There is an emerging consensus that urban street layouts should be planned with greater attention to 'placemaking' and urban design quality, while maintaining the conventional transport functions of accessibility and connectivity. However, it is not always clear how this might be achieved: we still tend to have different sets of guidance for main road networks and for local streetgrids. What is needed is a framework that addresses both of these, plus main streets - that don't easily fit either set of guidance - in an integrative manner.

Streets and Patterns takes up this challenge to create a coherent rationale to underpin today's streets-oriented urban design agenda. Informed by recent research, the book looks behind existing design conventions and beyond immediate policy rhetoric, and analyses a range of first principles - from Le Corbusier and Colin Buchanan to New Urbanism.

The book provides a new framework for the design and planning of urban layouts, integrating transport issues such as road hierarchy, arterial streets and multi-modal networks with urban design and planning issues such as street type, grid type, mixed-use blocks and urban design coding.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cities, Urban Planning

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[DW Rowlands · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book definitely did have some interesting ideas about how to classify street networks, and about the history behind Modernist ideas of how cities and roads should work. However, it just seemed very...formless? to me. I'm not sure what the issue was, beyond that I had trouble working out who the audience was supposed to be, and I think Marshall may have been trying to be "all things to all people" a bit too much.

[Michal Paszkiewicz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent study of streets and street systems. Excellent techniques for categorising them and a good analysis of what past approaches have meant for urban life.