Streets are an essential, if often invisible, part of communities. Streets can be vibrant parts of the urban realm, sites for children playing and neighborhood gatherings, loci of physical activity opportunities, or places of fear that fail to safely accommodate all users. Streets provide mobility – allowing us to travel – and accessibility – allowing us to reach destinations. Streets therefore serve a complicated and often conflicting set of goals and users.
This course will interrogate the role of streets in communities paying particular attention to how streets contribute to mobility, accessibility, economic vibrancy, social cohesion, and safety from crime and traffic danger. In all conversations, we will consider how different people – by income, race, travel mode – are affected by streets and transport policy. As “completing the streets” requires coordinated efforts across planning domains and related fields, this course should be of interest to a wide variety of students, e.g. planning, public health, public administration, environmental studies, environmental science.