Towards a holistic street design. Showcasing integration potentials of urban design and traffic engineering guidelines in relation to the sustainable development agenda.

Research Project, 2022 – 2024

Urban and transport planning are integral processes in urban development, synergetic in nature but often conflicting in application. For decades they followed parallel paths, separately evolved their concepts and methods, optimized and expanded their design guidelines, established best practices and universal standards. Despite of these advances in each field, the silo approaches and the predominance of traffic planning over urban design have caused a series of problems in urban areas (e.g. illegible, unsafe walking environments; infrastructure barrier effects; unattractive public spaces due to e.g. air and noise pollution; inefficient use of land resulting in high maintenance costs of public land and reduced revenues from development plans). This competition over urban space with different development agendas culminates in the street, the primary materialization of the interface between transport and urban development. For the sustainable development agenda, the street can play an important role by promoting multimodality and active travel, multifunctionality, accessibility to all, as well as environmentally friendly, viable, liveable and safe urban areas. This project will facilitate an integration of these approaches through knowledge exchange and integration of two practices responsible for street design: urban design and traffic engineering.