Streetscape, Shared Space in Coventry and Urban Design
The removal of traffic lights at certain junctions in Coventry city centre sparked a lively debate in recent months over some key issues in urban design – central to which is an argument about the best way to achieve a sensible balance of power between pedestrians and traffic.
A crucial concept in this debate is the strange notion of "shared space", a radical and apparently foolhardy idea which seems, at first sight, to turn common sense onto its head. But while we in Coventry continue to ponder the rights and wrongs of this brave new experiment, town planners in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea have taken this idea considerably further with the total redesign of London's Exhibition Road, a busy main artery which runs right through the centre of the capital's cultural heartland, with magnificent buildings on either side such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum, Imperial College and the Science Museum.
This road, leading up to the Royal Albert Hall at its northern end and once the main route to the Great Exhibition ‐held at Hyde Park in 1851 – has in recent years become an unpleasant and congested thoroughfare, often choked with lines of coaches and usually tricky for pedestrians to negotiate.
But since February this year, when the new scheme was officially unveiled, Exhibition Road has been re‐born and reinvigorated, courtesy of an extraordinary transformation. Gone are the traditional pavements, kerbs, barriers and street clutter. In their place is a single surface "shared space", with a stunning chequered granite design, which runs from South Kensington tube station to Hyde Park, covering the entire width of the road from building to building.
Motorists have been slowed down to 20mph and the distinction between roadway and walkway is achieved by visual and tactile lines which subtly delineate those areas for pedestrians, who enjoy the lion's share of the space, and those for traffic.
The result is a splendid pedestrian‐friendly streetscape which allows visitors to stroll from one end of the road to the other, and from one side of the street to the other, relatively untroubled by motor vehicles which are obliged to negotiate the space with more care than usual, precisely because the road lacks the more common assumption of an automatic right of way. The whole effect is enhanced by impressive street light columns down the centre of the road, occasional street benches, and an outdoor exhibition of sculpture.
The scheme was designed by the architects Dixon Jones and has already won several awards, but the real pioneer of the "shared space" concept was the Dutch traffic engineer Hans Monderman and the Danish urban planner Jan Gehl, who have helped to make the concept relatively common in Holland and Scandinavia.
Like the traffic junctions in Coventry, the redesign of Exhibition Road has not been without its critics and it is acknowledged to be an experiment. But the apparent success of the scheme does seem to indicate that "shared space" has much to offer and that Coventry, in a small but significant way, may be at the forefront of a fascinating development in contemporary urban design.
John Marshall