A SYSTEMATIC REVIEW OF MULTIFUNCTIONAL STREETS_Final research report

Report, 2020

A state-of-the-art, quantitative systematic review of scientific literature on the theme of multifunctional streets was conducted, including scientific papers of the last 10 years, filtered from Web of Science and Scopus. The review is part of a 3-year research project (2019-2021) named: “Smart streets” (Smarta gator) led by Alexander Ståhle (KTH Royal Institute of Technology) and financed by Vinnova (Swedish governmental agency for Innovation systems). The research project aims to develop a Street Multifunctionality Index (Gatufunktionsindex) to assess how existing and designed streets combine five different street functions - Social, Ecologic, Economic, Technical and Traffic - and also produce design guidelines for the design and planning of future multifunctional streets, either in new infrastructure or via retrofits. Within this project, the aim of the systematic review is twofold: first, to assess the degree in which the multifunctionality of streets is addressed in recent literature and provide an overview of the field by identifying where the general literature on the subject is trending, which are the recurrent issues studied, what themes are missing or being understudied; second, since an end product of the research project is to provide guidelines for urban design and planning practice, the review aims to identify the physical factors which have been empirically proven to support the different street functions, and especially those which support multiple functions. The second aim is pursued through focused thematic reviews, which complement the general overview of the field.