How to create great streets

One of three photos that rotate slowly on home page of Create Streets’ website. (Create Streets)

Headquartered in London, Create Streets seeks to teach Britons and their place-making institutions how to make better cities and towns. Its mission does not hesitate to include beauty in its remit. Its founder, Nicholas Boys Smith, is now co-chairman (along with Sir Roger Scruton) of the Building…

The apology to Sir Roger

The New Statesman magazine, a British rag, has apologizedat last for using monkeyed quotes from an interview in April to defame Sir Roger Scruton, who lost an important government post as a result. Who knows whether Scruton would like to return as chairman of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, still run by the craven housing minister who sacked the conservative philosopher and…

Charles to the battlements

Robert Venturi’s addition (left) to National Gallery of Art, in London. (venturiscottbrown.org)

With the new mayor of London applauding vigorously in the wings, Prince Charles mounted his steed again, taking on the modernists and challenging architects and developers to make new London neighborhoods with the joy and panache that made the old neighborhoods most of them live in.

Well, perhaps that…

Proposed new development on a nine acre brownfield site in north London.

In fact, this is a 'grass roots' proposal. The actual developer proposal appears to have little interest in placemaking. Click on the other images for comparison plans.

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Here are some ways that Formr (Lilac/Stoop/Streetmix3D) would mitigate against the bad proposed design:

With a basemap of terrain, natural features and existing buildings, it would be more difficult to ignore the surrounding street network and the River Fleet.

Similarly, the insistent inclusion of a 5-minute-walk neighborhood circle as a zone of analysis serves as a reminder of context.

Stoop t-zone definitions and building types would mitigate against out of place towers and even styles. The area would be built from the same T5 stuff as the surroundings.

In Lilac, streets are placed as whole rooms, never buildings or carriageways alone. This would make the bad plan much harder to draw than the good plan.

In Lilac, red flags for block length, enclosure and view lengths would nudge against the bad plan.