Incomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities
2015; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1478-341X
Autores Tópico(s)Urban Transport and Accessibility
ResumoIncomplete Streets: Processes, Practices, and Possibilities, Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman, Abingdon, Routledge, 2014, 346 pp., $51.95 (paperback), ISBN 9781317930983I live in a slowly gentrifying neighbourhood of Edinburgh, Scotland - of the sort that typifies many of the case studies in this book (Doucet, 2009). The main road to the city centre from the neighbourhood is currently being upgraded and there was a local campaign to get it redesigned in what this book, and readers based in North America, would call 'complete streets' style - wide pavements, segregated cycle lanes and vastly reduced space for vehicular traffic, with speeds reduced to 20mph. The battle was lost, and non-segregated, advisory cycle lanes were installed which are now predominantly used as car-parking places for businesses on the road. Meanwhile, in the more affluent south of the city, an extensive segregated network of cycle paths is emerging. In the suburban south-west of the city, a non-affluent community I work with extensively has poor quality public realm and a streetscape designed in the 1960s which is hostile to pedestrians and cyclists.This collection of essays edited by Stephen Zavestoski and Julian Agyeman illuminates these issues of equity and road infrastructure design in fascinating detail. The book focuses on the complete streets movement (living streets in the UK; standard road design in the Netherlands and Denmark) highlighting through various critical approaches that in societies with high levels of socio-economic inequality 'when implemented incrementally, complete streets will inevitably benefit certain people in certain urban spaces and not others' (7). The book is broken into three sections: processes, practices and possibilities.The processes section essentially takes us through stories to tell us 'where are we now?', starting off with Peter Norton's beguiling chapter on the role of the motor industry PR in the US in forming motor-vehicle oriented road design standards, a theme developed further by Aaron Golub. The chapters by Chronopolous and Lee then critically engage with the intersection of sustainability policies - such as complete streets design and congestion charging - and various policies that could be labelled 'neoliberal'. Chronopolous, in particular highlights how congestion charging is a regressive tax. The section ends with Mehta using an evocative description of street life in India to describe what a complete street might be like if it was truly inclusive.The sections on practices and possibilities were less clearly delineated in terms of content. They were mainly case-studies of various cities in the US and how they have implemented various complete streets policies, or related policies such as pavement/sidewalk food vending or community stewardship schemes. Particular highlights in these last two sections were Langegger's account of the racially-driven removal of Hispanic 'lowriders' from the streets of Denver and Vallianatos' account of the illegal street vendors making the sidewalks of Los Angeles their space.In their introduction Zavestoski and Agyeman rhetorically suggest that 'this volume initiates the kind of dialogue and future research that can help answer these questions' - and the trouble, as they allude to in their conclusion, is that many of the chapters do not answer questions. …
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