The Vitality Construction of Street

Abstract:If regarding the city as a human body, the streets are the blood vessels to the city. Street has been largely recognized as the most important public space because of its function to connect different places in a city. However, recent urbanism in great cities has ignored the important character of streets---a place for people. Companied with the development in technology, streets were become a place only for vehicular use rather than a public place for citizens. Lack of diversity made the streets seemly become isolated with people’s daily life. This essay will go on to consider how to create vitality to streets especially for pedestrian use in order to improve the quality of public living environment.

摘要

如果将城市看作是人体，那么街道就是它的血管。街道已经被广泛看作一个城市中最为重要的公共空间之一，因为它们是连接着城市各个区域的纽带。尽管如此，现在城市规划设计中，往往容易忽视街道的重要特性，那便是服务于使用人群。随着工业技术的发展，街道的设计中，越来越趋于只为机动车考虑，而非市民的公共空间。一条条缺乏活力的街道，离人们的日常生活渐行渐远。这篇文章将会对如何创造街道的活力，尤其是人行街道，以此来提高公共生活空间的品质。

Key words：

Street construction，vitality，public space，place for people，living environment

关键词：

街道建设，活力，公共空间，宜人空间，生活环境

中图分类号：D267.7文献标识码： A 文章编号：

正文：

1. The “Street” in History

1.1 The Origin of Street

The appearance of streets was companied with the emergence of villages. In ancient times, people gathered together and set up buildings near to each other for living requests, simultaneously, shared the same outside places. With the increase of the buildings, the outside places along the buildings gradually formed into a linear space where people could communicate, pass through as well as participate in social activities, this space can be considered as an embryo of streets. Afterwards, when those villages transformed into cities, the streets are rationally organized and became the streets system. It can be reasonably said, wherever there are buildings gathering together, there are streets which are the most important public space for people.

1.2 The Development of Street

The role of streets played in a city is extremely important. On one hand, they are the main element of urban context; on the other, they also can represent the social order and culture. In ancient Greek cities, the layout of the city was a response to natural environment. In Rome times, many cities chose the grid shaped street system which had reflected the Roman ambition to conquer the whole would (Southworth, 1997). The next identifiable period of city design was the medieval times. According to Munford (1961) street layout in the medieval city was arranged like a spider’s web. And Gehl (1987) has concluded the medieval urban space in European cities was exceptionally suited for outdoor activities as the street were developed to fit both pedestrians and vehicles (Hass-Klau et al, 1999). From fourteenth century, geometry concept was come out in the urban form layout, street became wider and more regular. In the middle of eighteenth century, the regeneration project in Paris illustrated a new typical layout of street system. This kind of radioactive street system has become a typical model from then on.