A paradigm shift in street design

Urban streets must be designed to be inclusive, accessible and safe for all users. A collaborative approach to street design, involving both top-down and bottom-up strategies, can help cities create streets that are more equitable and sustainable. This approach can help cities create vibrant public spaces that are accessible and welcoming to all users, while also addressing the needs of local communities.

Urban streets represent human existence, the highs and lows of what integrates the tangible realm of our lives every day. The manuals that municipal and state transportation planners use when constructing city streets have significant political impacts on many issues, including transit and bike ridership, pedestrian safety, public health, air quality, and many more. With time, street design has largely been impacted by the inflow of vehicles and the inclusivity of what qualifies as urban traffic. As a result, many cities struggling with mismanaged streets have begun to adopt more balanced, multi-modal approaches to street planning that are accessible and welcoming to all users.

Today, cities in India, when constructing new connecting roads, still follow this age-old approach that privileges the needs of automobiles before people or communities. Presenting a fresh approach, architects and planners must identify streets as a platform to integrate multiple cultures and societies to represent the identity of a locality. This is especially true in countries like India, where a major chunk of collective city life unfolds on the streets. Street shopping, snacking, and even elaborate religious worshipping are not just activities done on streets, but they are the pegs that hold together community life and expression.

Traditionally, street design has been dominated by a top-down approach with the narrow goals of providing connectivity rather than shaping communities. Planners and signatories have come together to lay out a plan involving centralised decision-making that is often rigid and authoritarian. On the other hand, the bottom-up approach involves a more decentralised and participatory view to planning, in which local communities and stakeholders are actively engaged in the process. Furthermore, it privileges a place-based attitude to designing streets which is more flexible and adaptive to local concerns as well as specific neighbourhood nuances. Rather than viewing these two approaches in a binary, a more fruitful solution would be to adopt a greater inclusive mandate that is focused on problem-solving.

In most tier I and tier II Indian cities, the bottom-up planning approach is complicated by the influx of street vendors, haphazard growth of small-scale retail stores, and unorganised parking. Moreover, with a vast population to cater to, their vehicles and corrupt local governance networks do not allow the smooth implementation of policies and create spaces where illegal vending, parking of cars, or privatisation of public space occurs.

Here, a state government might use a top-down approach to establish a more balanced transportation system that caters to the needs of all users, including pedestrians, bicyclists, and public transit users, as well as automobiles. At the same time, the city government might use a bottom-up approach to involve local communities and stakeholders in the planning and design process.

For instance, to manage street vending in the city, vending zones could be allocated and better licensing systems enabled for street vendors.

These measures could be accompanied by training and support programs to improve the quality and safety of their products. Bottom-up strategies might employ community organisations and local vendors to implement these measures and identify appropriate vending zones. Similarly, addressing informal vehicular parking can include allocating designated parking spaces and implementing parking permit systems for residential areas. At its heart, this approach requires collective planning intervention to help local urban bodies and people actively participate and sustainably drive change while ensuring a long-term planning strategy with a top-down viewpoint.