Slim City

Do you like walking the streets around your home? Doing your daily errands on foot or cycle? If not, why not? Ben Willis finds the odd development designed with healthy exercise in mind, and asks what would it take to make that the norm.

They take the wellbeing of residents very seriously at The Preserve. Yes, it is in California. But it’s not a health farm for detoxing Hollywood celebs; it’s a 7,000-home community on the edge of the city of Chino. The Preserve is one of a new breed of developments where the stereotype of Americans as overweight car-lovers is being put to the sword.

“How do you create a community that actually makes it enticing for people to walk?”

“The phrase we came up with when we were designing the Preserve is ‘pedestrian-seductive’,” says developer Randall Lewis. “It’s a good phrase, because it gives you a target: how do you create a community that actually makes it enticing for people to walk?” He has made it his business to do just that – spurred by revelations from the US Center for Disease Control on the strength of the link between obesity and the car-culture of most American neighbourhoods.

Neighbourhoods within The Preserve are built on a grid system of narrow streets. No part of it is more than a short walk away from any other. Parks, trails, and safe streets for children to play are all part of the way it’s planned. And, says Lewis, “we wanted to make it as easy as possible for kids to walk to school” – so the schools are located at the physical centre of their community.

“The more we drive, the more our cars mould our lives and our living space.”

The UK, likewise plagued by obesity, might do well to follow the Randall Lewis prescription. Yet the stats [see right] tell us we’re headed on a downward spiral towards sprawl and flab. We live in places that discourage even those who want to walk or bike it. The harder it gets, the more the car becomes the default option. But the more we drive, the more our cars mould our lives and our living space. And so we end up, at the bottom of the spiral, with the ‘obesogenic environment’.

Turning it round

Sustrans, the Bristol-based charity, is best known for blazing the trail for the national cycle network. It is also working locally to challenge car-centric thinking. The Dings is a prime example. In a deprived residential area close to Bristol city centre, the blight of ‘rat-run’ roads and commuter parking is gradually giving way to the Dings Home Zone.

‘Slow down’ signs, bollards and speed bumps everywhere, then? No, actually; quite the contrary – they’re clearing away the usual clutter of road signs and markings. Instead, in the home zone, pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles must look out for one another.

You’re no longer fair game on foot without a zebra crossing, and you’re not automatically top dog in your car, with a licence to do anything that’s not expressly forbidden. Instead, you’re all supposed to share street space – unmarked, unsegregated, universal – on equal terms. “For the past half a century, traffic engineering has been based on the principle that vehicular traffic and other activities are fundamentally incompatible,” says Ben Hamilton-Baillie.

The ‘shared space’ philosophy, as pioneered in Holland, Sweden and Denmark, turns this notion on its head – by removing from the streetscape all the physical elements that separate pedestrians, cyclists and motorists. Out go the pavements, bollards, railings, pelican crossings and even traffic lights.

“Shared space between bull-bar touting 4x4s and flimsy pedestrians and cyclists? Yes, and it works...”.

‘Shared space’ between bull-bar touting 4x4s and flimsy pedestrians and cyclists? It sounds mad – a recipe for mayhem. And yet, where it has been tried, the casualties are actually lower than where cars, cyclists and walkers are carefully segregated.

“The more isolated the different street users are, the less safe they actually are because it creates a false sense of security. So the idea is you remove the elements assumed to be necessary for safety,” says Hamilton-Baillie. And, when you’ve got it working, more people start cycling, and more people walk. “You can achieve change through aggressive speed bumps,” says Sustrans’ director of liveable neighbourhoods, Peter Lipman, “but our view is that it should be done through changing the environment – so motorists are clear when they drive into the Dings that it’s a different space where different behaviour is required.

” There’s a network of paths and interconnected green spaces, too, now nicely linked up with the popular Bristol-to-Bath cycleway for that trip out of town. Like Randall Lewis across the pond, Lipman is convinced that creating “a public realm conducive to physical activity” is the way to encourage people to build “incidental” exercise into their lives. The next challenge is how to take this thinking beyond a few one-off schemes like the Dings.

“It’s easy enough for the government to say people should take more exercise,” says Lipman, “but it’s not putting the necessary time or money into the public realm.” And he’s not short of suggestions for practical measures [see box] that could start making a difference. Tom Franklin, the chief executive of Living Streets, agrees. The main government departments that should be taking a lead, he says, are health and transport. But the issue has fallen down the crack between them.

“What we’ve got is the Department of Health focusing on getting sick people better, and the Department for Transport focusing on moving people around quickly, and neither focusing on the long-term health aspects of what they’re doing.” There are some encouraging signs. A new ‘joint agency forum’ has been set up, bringing together the key departments and quangos involved in how the ‘public realm’ is planned and managed.

On the practical level, the DfT has promised a new manual for transport planners on better design for residential streets. But if ever there was a big opportunity to turn things around, surely it’s the string of new communities planned for the Thames Gateway, Ashford, the M11 corridor and Milton Keynes. “With these growth areas, right from the beginning, we should be looking at building in design that encourages activity,” says Franklin.

Hence his proposed ‘walkability test’. In the same way that developers have to consider road access, and public transport, he argues, “we’d like to see them give clear evidence that they have considered how to maximise walking”. An example? “Where I live, there’s an important little cut-through, giving people access on foot to the shops on the main road.

Without it, people would have to go all the way round. In a lot of new developments, those little cut-throughs aren’t being built in.” There could be a lot hanging on the success of our first few shared space initiatives. Hamilton-Baillie believes they hold important lessons for the way future urban environments are planned. “If walking and cycling are to become natural ways of moving around,” he says, “you need a natural environment in which to do it – and not someone or something telling you how to do it.”

Fatter, Not Fitter

No will, or no way? The UK government started out with clear targets in its ten-year plan to get more people cycling – but they’ve been abandoned.

Bristol University researchers asked children if they cycled to school. One in fifty did; one in three said they’d like to.

In Perth, Australia, obesity is 10% higher in neighbourhoods where streets have no pavements.

5 January 2006

Ben Willis and Roger East