The value of street experiments for mobility and public life: Citizens’ perspectives from three European cities

Abstract

‘Street experiments’ (SE) are increasingly used to reallocate street space from traffic to space for people through temporary interventions. Existing research suggests that SE can mobilise the public in favour of post-car transitions and focuses on evaluating SE from an upscaling, public acceptability, or practitioner perspective, while there are few studies that explore what citizens value about SE in the context of everyday street life in an open-ended way. To fill this gap, this paper analyses how N = 458 citizens value five SE parklets and plazas in three neighbourhoods of London, Munich, and Bologna. We develop a primarily inductive and qualitative survey method for understanding what mobility and public life dimensions of SE that citizens value, considering both use value and the broader social meanings of street transformations. Based on empirical analysis, we develop a framework for analysing the value of SE with 10 categories spanning functional, social, safety, environmental and economic dimensions. The findings show that across all three European cities, the majority of citizens value the public life dimensions of SE more highly than SE benefits for active mobility: including the added value of SE for the attractiveness of the streetscape, making public space available for stationary activities, and creating opportunities for social and civic interaction within neighbourhoods. Our analytical approach can be used to understand citizens’ qualitative evaluations of SE, while our practitioner recommendations can help inform the design of more effective and inclusive SE interventions.

Keywords

• City streets
• Mobilities
• Public space
• Urban experimentation
• Transitions