A systematic review of the scientific literature on the theme of multifunctional streets

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Cities consist of 20-30% streets, a gigantic infrastructure that must be maintained and developed. As such, they have the potential to contribute to tackling contemporary challenges as the increasing urbanization and climate change which place higher demands on urban environments, from quality of life, health and safety to environmental sustainability. Multifunctional streets are introduced as an answer to these challenges, as they can fulfil this multitude of functions. This paper presents a state-of-the-art, quantitative systematic review of scientific literature on the theme of multifunctional streets. Scientific papers were filtered from Web of Science and Scopus. Only scientific papers of the last 10 years were included. We will first present a survey of the field and then focus on the empirical papers that help us identify the physical factors which have been proven to support and improve the different functions of streets, from the social and ecologic to the economic and technical. The empirical studies represent 24% of the scientific papers selected, where the social function is the one most frequently studied, followed by the ecologic and the economic function. Within the social function the empirical papers in relation to health (39%) and safety (21%) dominate, followed by the ones studying liveability (9%). We will focus on empirical studies on the themes of Liveability and Safety, two important variables of the Social function, interrelating yet often conflicting.