Reading Streets

Contemporary and future challenges of cities, such as global climate change with its particularly strong impact on cities through the urban heat island effect, the ever-increasing number of inhabitants and densification of urban spaces, and the change in transport needs and technologies, can only be addressed by considering the availability, configuration and design of public spaces. Streets hold a significant share of un-built urban space and are the largest public space by far. But in contrast to other public spaces like squares and parks, they also represent a continuous and all-accessible spatial construct in the form of a network that spans the entire city. Against this background, streets will be one of the deciding factors of the continued livability of urban areas. A comprehensive understanding of present-day streets, their genesis, function and design is therefore the essential basis for a sustainable and future-oriented development of urban areas.

Streets are the focus of a wide range of research efforts in various disciplines like traffic science, urban planning, landscape planning, public health research and many others. The predominance of car centric approaches in traffic planning in the first and well into the second half of the 20th century has led to a large number of research focused on the network aspects of streets. The consideration of streets as places with spatial qualities has only slowly developed since the late 1970s. However, there has been a lack of studies that combine these different perspectives on streets: as a space and as a network.

The aim of this dissertation is to enable a comprehensive and holistic understanding of streets and thus make them “readable”. It therefore treats streets as spaces that are interacting with other adjacent spaces (ground floor zone, courtyards, squares and parks), while simultaneously understanding them as part of the city wide network. The research methodology is based on a combination of both qualitative and quantitative analyses. The foundation is provided by a comprehensive literature review on the state of the art of research on streets. In selected research streets in Vienna, field studies on spatial and functional qualities are carried out together with morphological studies on different scales (house, plot, block and street). These qualitative assessments are then combined with quantitative network analysis on centrality, connectivity and accessibility on the catchment area of each individual street. This enables the illustration of the interactions and interrelations between the two fundamental characteristics of streets: streets as places and as components of a network. This comprehensive understanding of streets will then be employed to identify fields of action that focus on the future-oriented development of streets as spaces with a high quality of stay and a dominance of active forms of mobility.