Mark Chalmers

To follow on from an article I wrote elsewhere about community design, I thought it would be worth explaining where some of the ideas behind shared space stem from, since the two concepts seem complementary.  Following the logic through also throws up an unexpected conclusion…

“Radburn Crescent” began life as a traditional street, in the sense of a strip of tarmac 5.5 metres wide, with pavements roughly 1.5 metres wide on each side.  The transition between the two is a line of precast concrete bullnose kerbing, which is complemented each evening by an unbroken line of parked cars.  It’s a piece of traffic engineering.  Speeds in Radburn Crescent are high, at up to 30mph, considering it leads nowhere other than past folks’ houses.  In some ways the changes needed to make it more like a woonerf, a kerb-less street first introduced in the Netherlands in the 1970s, are slight but significant.

A woonerf is usually residential, and translated literally from the Dutch it means a “living yard”; rather than having separate roadway and pavements, everyone shares one surface.  For the woonerf to succeed, speeds have to be low – perhaps even lower than the 20mph speed limit which is gradually being brought in for housing estates across the country.  The implicit idea is that if a street is suitable for children to play on, it will be safe enough for adult pedestrians, too.

Most people associate the idea of the shared surface or shared space with Holland, but arguably its roots lie in a report published in Britain by the Ministry of Transport in the early 1960’s.  Colin Buchanan, who was an architect as well as a roads engineer, was tasked with investigating what could be done to reduce congestion and acknowledge the impact of the car.  Even in the Sixties, there was a burgeoning conflict between cars and towns.  Buchanan’s team came up with a technique for rejigging urban road systems by creating zones which they called “urban rooms”.

These rooms would acknowledge issues like noise, pollution, social activity, pedestrian routes and aesthetics.  Depending on the prevailing requirements, some would segregate traffic and pedestrians completely, whilst others would allow pedestrians and vehicles to mix in the street.  It was a seemingly obvious yet subtly revolutionary – though ironically the “Traffic in Towns” report had a much greater impact in continental Europe than it did in Britain.  German and Dutch planners enthusiastically adopted the idea, and many still refer to Buchanan as the father of traffic calming.

A few years later, in 1976, the first Woonerfen were built following a new set of guidelines – “Pedestrians may use the full width of the highway within an area defined as a woonerf; playing on the roadway is also permitted.  Drivers within a woonerf may not drive faster than at a walking pace. They must make allowance for the possible presence of pedestrians, including children at play, unmarked objects and irregularities in the road surface, and the alignment of the roadway.”

In due course, the woonerf spread from Holland to Denmark, Sweden, Germany and eventually back to Britain – in this country it’s often called a Homezone, which equates to a Wohnstraße in German-speaking countries.  I recently passed through Holland on a road trip, and woonerfen were quite evident in Eindhoven – although on busier roads traffic was still segregated, even to the point where pavements were divided into a cycle lane and a pedestrian lane.  Beware of the cycle lanes, though: the Dutch allow folk to ride motor scooters along them, and as we stood admiring an old Philips factory, we were nearly mown down by mini-Mods on a Vespa…

Travelling further back in time to seek the roots of the Woonerf, and of Colin Buchanan’s report, many streets in the north-west of England, around Salford, Wigan and Liverpool were designated as “Play Streets” in the years after the war.  No cars were allowed to drive down them between 8am and dusk, hence effectively “traffic calming” them, and without the need for speed humps, either.  That posits the question about quality of place: is it just about the lack of cars?  In a moment of lucidity, I realised that traffic speeds and volumes ultimately work their way back to the pivotal factor of density.

High density inner cities were the grail of urban designers for many years, and even yet many look to create medium density, low rise cities.  They seem very “sustainable”, given the aim of creating walkable neighbourhoods with schools, shops, parks and public transport within a ten minute walk.  By that token, the very low density landscape of crofts that you find in rural Angus or Aberdeenshire is desperately unsustainable.  After all, it appears you have to drive everywhere – for shops, for school, even for work – because crofts are strung out along valleys, on winding tracks that lead off equally winding B-roads.  So far, so what, because the answers for urbanists lie in urban design.

The size of settlements usually relates to the provision of services: a series of clusters might be populous enough to support a primary school.   Population thresholds for the viability of local services are always under attack – schools, libraries, banks and post offices are still being closed down by an unsympathetic government and its agencies – it seems the natural thing to do is to increase population density until it supports those services.  That also pushes up land values, and helps to generate the margin needed to build things.

Turn again, Dick Whittington.  The answer might lie instead in rural design.  We already have thousands of small communities which are sustainable to an extent because they’ve dealt with the issues of density.  Shopping can still be bought thanks to travelling shops, schools are reached using school buses, and work is integrated thanks to many villages being truly “mixed-use” clusters of dwellings and workshops.  More importantly for the shared space thesis, there’s no need for any intervention on the single track leading up to a croft house – the narrow roadway is implicitly shared, by tractors, bikes, sheep and children.  


Rough metalling, hedges, bends and potholes combine to foster low speeds, so there’s no need to artificially traffic calm them with the much-hated speed humps.  Land values may not support the kind of traffic engineering you find in cities – blacktop with drainage, winter gritting, road markings retro-reflective signs, and cats’ eyes are expensive – but perhaps much of that is overkill.  If urban streets were de-engineered, simplified and greened, speeds would naturally reduce.  They might also have a resonance for hard-pressed city dwellers tired of deterministic design – whether from urbanists or traffic engineers.

Perhaps Colin Buchanan’s urban room and the woonerf’s living yard have a future in the countryside.