1.
Even considered solely as thoroughfare, the richness of the city street is all but inexhaustible.
Start with the sidewalk underfoot. Simply as a way for pedestrians to move through the city, sidewalks turn out to be unexpectedly complicated ecosystems. New York City’s Department of Transportation officially defines six “levels of service” for sidewalks, from A through F.
The mood of the street changes noticeably as each threshold is passed, from the wide-open if detectably melancholy tenor of LOS-A - where each user enjoys 130 or more square feet of space, is free to choose his or her own path, pace, and direction, and finds that “conflicts between pedestrians are unlikely” - to the final crunch experienced as the area of space enjoyed by each pedestrian drops below six square feet.
This is LOS-F: “all walking speeds are severely restricted. There is frequent, unavoidable contact with other pedestrians. Cross- and reverse-flow movements are virtually impossible.” Molecular movement is out of the question, in such a throng; you move as a molar unit, or not at all.
Putting aside for the moment the strong likelihood that the precise value marking the transition from one level of service to another is subject to local variation, these are the conditions that bracket between them the entire range of possibilities we think of as “street life.”
Building ingress and egress become difficult or impossible beyond some critical threshold. Street features like newsstands, café terraces, and advertisements are all activated by some velocity of throughput between these two poles. (What is the maximum walking speed at which you can read an orthogonally-presented newspaper headline, or an ad, without breaking pace?) Even quantities we don’t ordinarily think of as having anything to do with speed - the mean distance between lamp standards, for example - turn out upon closer inspection to be conditioned on assumptions of the rate of pedestrian flow.
This flow is invariably subject to restriction of various sorts. Behind closed doors, among those who share the assumptions governing a given private domain, these constraints generally go unstated, but the street, being a public place, is of necessity a zone of enunciated rules: DON’T WALK, LOOK BOTH WAYS, NO PARKING, and so on. Below our feet, a rich set of markings constitutes a private hieroglyphics of infrastructure - an “urban markup language” regulating flows of a different order, decipherable only by the specialists for whom it is intended.
Then there are the sidewalk features that begin to implicate the street proper - bus shelters and bays (i.e. nodes of another circulation network overlaid onto that of the sidewalks), traffic signals, the curbs themselves. These refer to a set of parallel flows which negotiate the space between buildings at (ostensibly) higher velocity. Moving through a space at the speed of driving activates different potentials than doing so at the speed of walking; as we’ll see, the car kills the body, in more ways than the merely literal.
Not everyone, of course, acknowledges these distinctions. Particularly, a skateboarder’s or a bike messenger’s refusal to observe the distinctions between street, alley, sidewalk and architectural feature makes of the city a more or less smooth space of flows.
However constrained or frictionless, it’s only natural that this space is sometimes confused with the city itself. Just as it’s said that the outlines of any given human body are discernible in a map of the nematodes infesting it, it’s tempting to conclude from diagrams of automotive or pedestrian traffic that flow is the function of street. And while it’s true that flow - circulation, exchange - is ultimately what makes cities possible, that’s not the whole story.
2.
We know that a street is never simply a means of circulation.
We’d know this even if we did nothing more than listen to the language, where the word shows up in constructions connoting averageness (that classic icon of the mid-century masses, the “man on the street”), the mass opinion (”the Arab street”), corruption (Maggie: A Girl of the Streets), authenticity (”You are now about to witness the strength of…“), promiscuity and mixture in every sense.
But better still is understanding this as a consequence of having lived the street not as interstitial, not as a functional/operational leftover consecrated to mere logistics, but as a human environment in its own right. And it’s still hard to find a better guide to this environment than Bernard Rudofsky’s 1969 Streets for People.
Subtitled “A Primer For Americans,” Streets was Rudofsky’s desperate attempt to impart something of the delight he took from the portici, ramblas and impasses of Europe (and in the Arabian suq) to an audience he obviously thought too car-addicted and philistinated to benefit from anything less than a frontal assault on their sensibilities.
The argument at the book’s core is that, for a variety of reasons, urban spaces on the North American continent have never afforded their residents the myriad pleasures of genuine street life, in which features of the cityspace are devised not merely to afford pleasure, but to be conducive to a life simultaneously more convivial and more considered.
Rudofsky’s work is magisterially cranky, and it is perfectly valid to criticize it as essentially fetishizing the daily life of the Other. Too, Rudofsky understands his self-assigned mission civilisatrice to be a hard sell to an audience inured to the worst that mid-century America had to offer, and it makes him defensive; in places, his entirely justifiable stance is on the verge of being undercut by the bile in his voice - a overly-healthy admixture of what we would now call “snark.”
But I wouldn’t want you to let that get in the way of finding it useful, let alone enjoying it. Streets is full of passages celebrating the quality of pedestrian experience in a world utterly vanished and subducted beneath “modernity” - and what a sense of what we’re missing in everyday life emerges from them! Here’s Rudofsky on a terribly civilized-sounding Italian amenity known as the albergo diurno, or “day hotel”:
It flourished in the years between the world wars, a time when organized tourism did not yet rear its ugly head, and hotels were few and far between. In order to fit into the already crowded pattern of the street, it was put underground, much like a subway station. It suits the footloose; after a bath in a man-size [sic] tub, he [sic] can take his siesta while his clothes are pressed and his shoes are repaired, or shined to a gloss.
A MetroNap kind of pales by comparison, doesn’t it? And this is just a single one of the pleasures afforded by the richness of street life.
What Rudofsky does not allow himself to say, will only allude to with vague and indistinct gestures, is that these pleasures often have more than a tinge of eros to them.
When you when you surrender yourself to the street, you are also opening yourself to the possibility of meeting a work of art, a cuisine, a sound, a momentary juxtaposition, or especially a person, that bears a nonzero chance of utterly derailing your life: vectors that could take you up and entirely out of the life you thought you were living, for better or for worse.
And, at least where men were concerned, these possibilities of the street classically concerned the exercise of sexuality - not merely the predictably mercenary transactions in the shadows, or those involving passing through certain neon lit entryways, but a certain quickening of the pulse and all-but-imperceptible shift of pelvic geometry that accompanies walking alone through the streets of a city one has never before known. For American men of Rudofsky’s generation, this heightened intensity was the secret meaning of the European street, and of the “sophistication” they found there.
I think it’s worth pointing out here, as an aside, that, as a consequence of vastly lowered barriers to access, Americans have to look much further afield for the exotic Other these days. Thanks to improved logistics and plummeting airfare, the culture has utterly lost the frisson of libertinism that used to be imparted by the words “Dutch” or “Swedish.” (Maybe “Rio” or “Bangkok” still carry the faintest leering trace of it.) What happens when even the Mysterious East loses its erotic sheen and aura of potential becoming?
This is only one of the ways in which history has caught up with and overtaken Rudofsky, who was writing in the interval between Death and Life of the Great American Cities and the publication of Holly Whyte’s Social Life of Small Urban Spaces; his pleas for a decent cup of coffee and a liminal place in which to enjoy it, especially, ring a little hollow in a day when Starbucks outlets and other would-be “third places” are well-nigh inescapable.
There’s also the deeper, harder-to-address issue that most of the things celebrated in Streets are finally just that: things. It seems to me that one could kit out just about any American city with the full retinue of Old World paraphernalia and still not realize any gross improvement in quality of life, since they’re being situated in a social context in which evening promenades and siestas are anything but normative.
Just as translating the word dérive into English - “stroll” - divests it of much of its insouciant glamour, merely injecting the physical furniture of the European Old City into (say) the New York streetscape would hardly elicit the alteration in subjectivity Rudofsky clearly wants to accomplish. We bear the imprint of our Calvinist and Taylorist predecessors far too vividly for that, I fear, and the armature of ambient informatics we now live within of course only makes it harder to justify (or even achieve) unclocked, unaccountable time.
But obsolescence, latent phallocentrism, and wishful thinking aside, Rudofsky is onto something; almost forty years downstream from Streets, the sheer enjoyment afforded by sitting on a Geneva plaza for the space of an unbranded café au lait, or strolling the busy, foodstall-lined boulevards of Seoul at midnight, rivals any experience the North American urban environment has to offer. And the question I’d want to set before any would-be digital intercessionary is this: how will your intervention enhance the quality of street life here (wherever that “here” should happen to be), in a way that’s both fructifying and true to what has gone before?
3.
Whatever solution is arrived at, whatever model of the street is offered, I hope it’s better than the one inscribed in the public space which has most supplanted the street, the mall.
To Henri Lefebvre, a street was at least in part an “incision/suture” simultaneously dividing and connecting two adjacent but heterogeneous realms. But that presupposes a real heterogeneity; mallspace ultimately turns the street in on itself, making of it a sealed topology, a closed loop of circulation between highly self-similar (commercial) destinations.
And when this model is reimported into the fabric of an actual city? We know what that looks like: it’s the repeating module of Dunkin’ Donuts, nail salon, cellphone outlet and bank branch that now constitutes the basic element of the Manhattan street grid.
What happens to the barely subtextual eros of the street life Rudofsky celebrated under conditions like these, and the joi de vivre it gave rise to? They die. In my reading, it’s precisely this which the mall and the contemporary North American street are trying to suppress (and ultimately, to kill). In their stead is the street reduced to joyless functionalist thoroughfare, something that might as well be given over entirely to vehicles - and autonomous ones, at that.
Happily, though, we have a new and powerful set of tools at hand. And one of the hopes I have for the superimposition of the virtual onto the physical space of the street is that it will reactivate its inherent capacity for mystery, enjoyment, volatility and novelty. At risk is the entire upside of the bargain that has made cities endurable for millennia - if we fail at this, we fail big, and in a way that won’t be so easy to recover from.
