Narrow Streets

Like many people, I happen to enjoy using Google Maps’ Street View function to explore cities around the world in the first-person. This sort of pastime can reveal loads of intimate information about the character of cities in a way which would have been impossible before the technology existed. Perhaps we are indebted to whatever intern they make drive those strange camera cars through every residential street in Los Angeles, etc. Their photos reveal urban environments which are distinctive in almost every conceivable way, except in China, where they’re not allowed to do it. In my recent Street View explorations, however, there is one particular aspect of city planning that has been occupying an outsize portion of my brain: the width of the city streets themselves.

Street widths are somewhat underappreciated, but they determine nearly every facet of city life. Eminent urbanist Jane Jacobs, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, does not address the topic in more than an incidental manner, though she spends much of the book dealing with other aspects of spatial street life. Street widths are an inherently frustrating issue for the urban planner because they cannot easily be changed, as buildings cannot be physically moved closer to each other and, for the most part, the current buildings can’t feasibly be demolished for such a purpose.

But why would we want to change the street width in the first place? Contrasting examples may serve us well. Consider this street in the neighborhood of Trastevere in Rome:

Now consider this street in Hyde Park, Chicago:

(I was about to use a photo from some abysmal place in the Inland Empire, but I figured this may be an unfair standard of comparison, considering the lesser density of the buildings in that area).

What is significant about these areas in contrast? How do we feel about our place as the pedestrian (the prime vector of urban experience, at least ideally) in these environments? One of the first things we may notice is the lack of “comfortability” that the Hyde Park example gives. To be a pedestrian on this street is harsh, dizzying. Our spatial environment is not adequately controlled to create a comfortable place. On the one side of us (as we walk on the sidewalk) we have a building; on the other side, a vast chasm of visual emptiness, beyond which the other building appears as a faraway place. To be on this street, we must be subjected to a constant barrage of automobile traffic noise coming from a hostile space taking up 80% of the space between property lines. Even more so, no defined space is created by the buildings, leaving us without spatial bearings in our environment.

The Roman street, on the other hand, is, as some people have put it, like an “outdoor living room.” It creates “enclosure,” which invites us to see the streets not as funnels for car traffic, but rather as living space for inhabitants of the city. The buildings are the walls of this outdoor room, and just as one feels more comfortable in an average living room than in a warehouse, a trim street makes us feel at home.

This is not only an aesthetic quality of the street. It has real ramifications on what the street can be space for, and how it can function. Consider the social aspect of the area. For the pedestrian in Rome, one is surrounded by liveliness in a more concentrated form than on 55th Street in Chicago. Think of this: if you and your friend are both walking down 55th Street, but happen to be on opposite sides of the street, you may evade each other’s notice entirely. Not so on the Roman street. We can probably all recall instances where we intentionally try to meet a friend at a given location, but end up on the opposite side of the street from them, having then to wait for the crosswalk to join together.

The social aspect of the street also is noticed in the way that the uses of buildings on either side of the street relate to each other. If you happen to live in one of the apartments facing this kind of street, exiting your apartment will bring you into direct contact with your neighbor’s “front porch.” Whereas wide streets allow us to dissociate our personal environment from the public environment, a narrow-street setup brings us into direct contact with the shared nature of this public space. You and your neighbor share this space, and the fact that your building is “facing” theirs brings about a feeling of interactivity which is not present in the street which conceptually separates its two sides.

One aspect of street design which I have implied in my analysis is pedestrianization. Pedestrianized streets are very common in Europe, and almost wholly absent in America. Certain city programs such as New York’s “Open Streets” initiative are starting to change this, to great effect. Notice, however, that the street in Trastevere actually does have cars running down it! Even if cars are technically allowed in the space, the constrained nature of the place will make drivers avoidant of the area, and will make them drive very carefully and slowly when they do need to enter it. This creates a good street dynamic for practical purposes, as necessary car traffic (in the possible cases of emergency vehicles or business deliveries) is not obstructed, while the overall character of the street remains pedestrian. Just as the ox-cart of pre-automobile times could enter a street without pushing out other uses, the slow car on a narrow street can be an innocuous presence on a narrow street (especially with the much more reasonably-sized cars they make for markets in Europe and Japan).

One may notice, in fact, that many streets in European cities lack sidewalks at all. Though this may seem to thrust the pedestrian into the dangerous world of automobile traffic, in fact it does quite the opposite: the lack of sidewalks gives drivers the feeling that they are impinging on a pedestrian space, encouraging them to act less entitled to the road space. This is the interesting dynamic I noted in Italy, that people seem to be much more comfortable with moving cars near their personal space, as if they had been domesticated to the human space. In America, by contrast, we treat moving cars with the the same avoidance we would afford to a dangerous wild animal. This is no doubt also due to the smaller, less dangerous nature of European cars. It would be of no concern if a Fiat or a Vespa were motoring down your street in Trastevere, as it’s very clear who takes precedence in the space.

Along with the shape of the street layout itself (which is its own fruitful topic), the width of the roads is, in many ways, an immovable fact of life. In most developed city areas, the streets will have already gained many important, historical, and/or architecturally significant buildings which cannot, and should not, be demolished for the purpose of such a project. Neither can these buildings be moved, except by some kind of complicated, invasive, and prohibitively expensive project, the like of which is only rarely used.

There are, however, several workable solutions, even if they are somewhat suboptimal to just having these streets in the first place. One idea which has interested me especially, as well as a number of other people interested in urban planning, is to create new blocks out of excess road space. This idea has been excellently visualized by activist Steve Dombek. I had figured that this idea would be more popular, given its obvious benefit to real estate interests, in that it creates new city real estate out of thin air (aside from business interests, this also benefits the city as a whole, as long as the space is used productively, such as for housing). Imagine if this were done to the block of 55th Street pictured above. An otherwise desolate city block becomes two separate narrow, pedestrianized streets which function much like shopping arcades, serving as a space of refuge from the wide, inhospitable wide city streets while simultaneously still acting as part of the public realm and inviting neighborhood liveliness. Ideal areas for this sort of project would be streets which are wider than their amount of traffic makes necessary. Some streets, such as Broadway in New York, actually make traffic worse by their very existence (due to the complicating nature of unnecessary traffic connections), making projects like these a win-win-win for the city in these areas. Whether one block would be the extent of an area like this, or whether it would spread over a number of city blocks, is at the discretion of the planner and how they wish to integrate cross streets.

Another option is focusing on areas with little current development, or ones which are in the process of redevelopment. Look at this street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2009:

Now compare this to the area in 2022:

As streets in America go, this one actually isn’t so bad. However, if the city had ceded some of the street space to the developers (potentially making the city some extra money in the process), the block could have easily turned into a narrow, comfortable, inviting pedestrian street! The city gains funds, more housing stock is able to be built, and a new street is minted which improves the character of the neighborhood. Preferably, of course, this would include requiring buildings with more street access and diversity of use. If an area is developing quickly, this approach could be deployed in broad fashion. If an area is already established, this could be done on an ad-hoc basis when redevelopment occurs.

A third option is the redevelopment of existing city blocks to allow for a narrow passage from one side of the block to the other. By this method, existing city streets do not become narrower, but new narrow streets are created which add diversity in street types to the city. This solution also solves multiple purposes. Creating a new street adds frontage to an area, allowing for more street-level businesses to open in the area. Jane Jacobs reminds us that doing so also creates a more interconnected city grid, breaking up long and isolating blocks. For concrete examples of this kind of plan in action, look at 6 1/2 Avenue and Shubert Alley in New York City.

Other urbanists have given more solutions to these problems, such as eliminating mandated setbacks on properties and adding trees to add a sense of horizontal and vertical enclosure. These are both great solutions, but as others have expressed them eloquently elsewhere, I won’t delve into them at length.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having wide streets in a city. In fact, they are often necessary, if the number of vehicles and/or pedestrians requires such a space. The city planners of America’s past decided that streets should be wide in order to let in light and allow for increased ventilation. These motivations did lead to many streets which achieved aesthetic and functional success, as one can see walking through many a tree-lined street in Chicago or New York. However, when these streets become the overwhelming majority of city streets, or when they attain a width which truly hinders the benefits of narrow streets as outlined above, the city needs to change its streetscape. These solutions, if implemented, would create a city with a greater capacity to generate places of intimacy, comfort, and increased liveliness.

See also: Narrow Streets Los Angeles