Creating More People-Friendly Urban Streets Through ‘Link and Place’ Street Planning and Design

For the last fifty years, urban street planning and design in the UK and several other European countries has been led by traffic engineers who have given priority to the needs of motor vehicles. This has resulted in street environments that are unattractive for people on foot, whether travelling along the street, or using the street as a destination for economic or social activities. Attitudes to the street environment are now changing in the UK, with the publication of a ‘Manual for Streets’ by the government, focussing on new urban residential streets, and the development of a comprehensive ‘Link and Place’ Guide to planning and designing all types of urban streets by the authors. Both documents stress the need to consider each street in its wider urban context, as both a movement channel forming part of the road network (i.e. a Link) and as Place in its own right. Design solutions should be influenced by both Link and Place user needs, and solutions will vary according to the balance of significance of these two at any location. The paper introduces the concept of Link and Place; it illustrates the range of street functions and user needs and shows how classifying streets on this basis leads to a greater consideration of the needs of people, rather than vehicles, in street planning and design. It discusses how this broadens the basis for assessing street performance and prioritising areas for improvement, and helps to determine the appropriate balance of street space and capacity to be allocated to different street user groups. This, in turn, affects the kinds of design solution appropriate in different contexts. People-based planning is central to this approach, and the paper concludes by illustrating a hands-on public consultation exercise that used Link and Place principles to redesign an urban high street to meet the needs of local residents and businesses, using both physical and computer-based design tools.