It seems the Canadians have taken to promoting the idea of street orchards…which since I had been reading Great Streets by Allan Jacobs (1993) seemed a great way (with a co-operative enlightened council) of enhancing urban residential streets and providing edible opportunities for both people and fauna.
It is Jacobs belief that sociability is a major reason behind the development of urban centres. And I suppose economic exchange is just one part of a broader view of sociability. Residential streets are places to come home to, to relax in and to spend time at with the family as well as create mini-communities.
Jacobs says “There have been times when streets were a primary focus of city building – streets rather than individual buildings.” Streets are the place where urban landscape and architecture intersect and mingle.
It would be interesting to take some cues from Jacobs and add to the collection of green roofs, a collection of great streets!
Read more including source of photo at http://spacingmontreal.ca/2008/01/14/planting-fruit-trees-on-city-streets/
Congratulations to the Canadians! The concept of ‘street beautification’, popular in the UK during the 1930s involved tree planting of this type.
I agree that too much of the idea of making ‘streets’ has been lost – and I blame the highway engineers. Their instinct is to think of ‘roads’ instead of streets and to use legal powers to plan them as traffic arteries.But I suppose they could make an etymological point: our word street comes from the Latin via strata meaning ‘paved road’. Roman roads were paved in town and country – and it seems to have been done primarily for wheeled traffic. The streets of Pompeii were not the type of streets we would like to have, and were not planted with trees.
Was looking at the website of McGill University, Canada’s premier architectural school, and I noticed the website of Dutch architects OMA (Office of Metropolitan Architects) [http://www.oma.eu/]…hopefully riot police and armoured vehicles are NOT the future of our urban streets!
The London School of Economics have published a series of essays on the December 2008 riots in Greece to try to explain the phenomenon of what they call ‘The return of street politics’.
[http://www2.lse.ac.uk/ERD/pressAndInformationOffice/publications/books/2009/GreeceDecRiots.aspx]
ps. OMA’s photo-background is a constantly changing…so..the link may not make much sense without some sort of visual cue…
This internet news report is a strange interpretation of the significance of the Greek street riots. [http://scrapetv.com/News/News%20Pages/Everyone%20Else/pages/Greek-riots-spark-global-realization-that-Greece-is-still-a-country-Scrape-TV-The-World-on-your-side.html]
I wonder if the world really has forgotten Greece is still a country? I wouldn’t have thought so….