Seth Maney

Living Streets Create Resilient Places 

When people think about public space, we picture parks, plazas, and greenways but overlook the largest single public space asset in any city: the street network. Streets can comprise upwards of twenty-five percent of urban land area and should be counted as public space right alongside our leafy parks and landscaped squares. Pioneered in the Netherlands in the 1960s, the woonerf, Dutch for “living street”, is a residential street concept in which pedestrians share the street with vehicles and vehicles follow the pedestrians’ pace. The principle of the living street should be applied to the collectors and local roads of our street networks in order to create more resilient public spaces and biophilic cities.