These streets were made for walking...

By David Sillito
BBC Arts Correspondent

One of Colchester's successfully busy streets

Colchester has a problem. The town centre is busy but only a few hundred yards to the east of the busiest shopping street there's a bleak little corner of boarded up shops and windswept empty streets.

So Colchester has gone looking for help but the important question was deciding what sort of help.

In the end they chose a group who's expertise was not architecture or planning or retail but how people walk.

There was nothing wrong with the buildings, they said, it was the streets.

It appears the best way of deterring crime is to have people around... the safest place to leave your car is in direct sight of an entrance or exit

For most highway engineers streets are a means of getting to places, a necessary but hazardous space between places we want to be. But increasingly a new approach is beginning to take hold which suggests that a successful street is one with lots of people.

In a society which has grown used to equating a stranger with danger this is an alarming idea.

Take the modern cul-de-sac, it was created in order to reduce the number of people wandering past to make the street feel safer. Now one scheme in a housing estate in Hackney in East London in which cul-de-sacs were replaced with through streets has seen the number of burglaries cut by around 40 per cent.

It appears the best way of deterring crime is to have people around. In most hospital car parks the safest place to leave your car is in direct sight of an entrance or exit. The most heavily used benches are always those placed near to where people naturally congregate.

It seems we don't usually want to sit in quiet secluded corners but that is where you usually find most of the seats. Shopkeepers of course have long seen the benefit in having people walking past but now urbanologists are increasingly seeing pedestrians as a solution to many of our modern problems.

The problem is understanding what makes us walk.

Natural routes

Colchester's unused public benches; people prefer to sit with others

So this is why Colchester turned to Space Syntax. It's a firm that's grown out of years of research at University College London.

Bill Hillier has looked at the routes people take across towns and cities and tried to see if there's a pattern. He claims that most of us prefer to walk in a straight line.

Each time we are forced to change direction or meander then we quickly lose the will to carry on. We also like to see where we are going.

So what was wrong with Colchester?

The diagnosis was simple. The town was built by the Romans and had a series of straight roads running west to east. In the 1960s, three of these roads had been split in two or had lost their pavements. Shops and malls had blocked the natural routes.

It was simple to walk round them but people simply didn't. The solution is a number of new streets, straight streets, and streets in which there is a main destination visible.

But it's also the quality of the street that is important.

In the 1960s the urbanologist William H Whyte wrote about what he saw on streets in the United States. His interest wasn't just the numbers of people but the way people walked.

The more people there are, the more car drivers will avoid the area... it's not about eliminating cars but finding a way of controlling them

He noted down the speed they walked, the number of times they stopped, the number of times people stopped and chatted, he even noticed if couples held hands.

Observation showed how we prefer to walk where we can see around us, we avoid walking past blank walls or dark entrances or through underpasses or dark covered walkways.

Social function

The best places, were places with people, he even put a figure on it, seven people a minute.

His overriding passion was showing that the street had a social function. It was the place where we walked, socialised, played and held demonstrations.

His ideas have now permeated an increasing number of architects who realise that the success of their buildings depends increasingly on the success of the spaces outside.

Space Syntax's Tim Stonor studies how people use public spaces

Architects plans often have drawings of people sitting, talking and laughing outside their proposed buildings. The finished buildings may have looked like the plans but the people weren't so cooperative.

The solutions are now rapidly appearing. In Kensington and Chelsea, pedestrian barriers and other forms of road safety, even, in one street the pavement itself, are being removed.

The theory is that the less regulation there is the more people and cars will be force to interact with one another. Uncertainty will force cars to slow down to a speed in which eye contact can be made.

Slowing down cars will make people feel safer and encourage them to linger. And the more people there are, the more car drivers will avoid the area. It's not about eliminating cars but finding a way of controlling them.

In Cowcross Street in London the pavements have been widened and cleared of much of their street furniture. Street lights are now on the sides of the buildings illuminating the pavement rather than the carriageway.

They have also changed colour. Recent research at University College London has shown we are much better at recognising faces under white light than yellow light. Highway engineers say yellow is cheaper but if you factor in this increased effectiveness then it's claimed white is the more efficient option.

People find it easier to recognise faces under white rather than the cheaper yellow street lights

In London's Trafalgar Square, a simple piece of pedestrianisation has increased the number of people using the square thirteen fold.

Behind all this is a change in urban philosophy that is trying to re-engineer our towns to make them reflect our social needs. There are good economic reasons for this. Struggling retailers are always happy to see more people walking past.

But there's also a much deeper issue. It's the reason why a live football match is better than seeing it on television and why cinemas are still busy in an age of DVD and it's the reason many of us visit town centres and shopping arcades.

We like being near people. There's a chance of bumping in to a friend, of seeing something new or simply sitting down and watching the World go by. A bad street can make us miserable and lonely.

The academic Donald Appleyard carried out research in to the social lives of people living on different types of street. He concluded that people living on a street with more than 16,000 cars a day passing had on average three fewer closer friends and half the number of acquaintances of those living on quiet streets.

The bleak modern street is - it's claimed - a creation of a fearful, risk averse culture. The new philosophy suggests that we shouldn't measure an urban street according to how it moves people and cars but whether people are happy to be there.

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David Sillito's film was shown by Newsnight on 21 January 2005.

Newsnight is broadcast every weekday in the UK at 10.30pm on BBC Two.

You can also watch the programme live - and on demand for 24 hours after initial broadcast - from Newsnight's website.

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