[MUSIC] Hello, and welcome back to the course and for today's paper, we're going to be reviewing Luca Bertolini 2020 paper from streets for traffic to streets for people, can street experiments transform urban mobility? And that is the question for this module. The main question posed in this paper is, what types of street experiments have been undertaken in pursuit of the vision of the streets for people instead of the streets for traffic? What other backgrounds, main characteristics, and reported impacts? How can these city street experiments trigger systematic change in urban mobility? To set the stage for an answer Bertolini says quote, city streets are becoming increasingly spaces for experimentation. In many policy fields experimentation has become the dominant the paradigm. The hope of experimentation is that the experience will generate a broad consensus about the direction of progress, or at least enhanced understanding about the possibilities and constraints of change. The layout of this paper is quite practical and very clear. So if you're looking for some real world advice out of this paper, you got it. The way that this paper is set up is that first it gives you a brief explanation about the theoretical framework, the difference between the streets for traffic and streets for people paradigms. Then it continues to give you quite a thorough review of the different ways that cities and people have undertaken street experiments for this purpose. This paper in particular has collected together many real world examples where experiments have happened from examples all around the world. And finally, this paper then recommends and assessment framework for the question, how can city streets experiments trigger systemic changes in urban mobility, the third section tackles the issue of okay so we have these successful and unsuccessful experiments, what do we do with the successful experiments afterwards? How can we then institutionalize these successful trials and make them part of the streetscape? It's much more challenging than you might initially think. So let's go back to the beginning and revisit what are the different types of street experiments that can be conducted. In the paper you'll find some very helpful tables that summarize the differences and the similarities between these street experiments, roughly speaking, there are four types remarking streets, repurposing parking space, repurposing sections of streets and perhaps the golden standard, repurposing the entire width of streets. The author remarks that historically quote, previously streets were unmarked and different uses both mobility and non mobility related when negotiate the space informally through social convention and interaction. And Bertolini later argues that this interaction has been lost in the modern street and perhaps this street experiments are one way that we're trying to find the balance once again. In the 1960s, 70s, we shifted heavily towards the automobile. And recently you can see street closures as a way to kind of reclaim the streets for this different purpose of play of socializing and a lingering. He says quote, the repurposing of entire streets is arguably the ultimate city street experiment. The most well known approach is ciclovias, the name given to the approach in Latin America where it is introduced or open streets as we call it in North America. And next, let's visit in more detail the question, how can city street experiments trigger systemic change in urban mobility? And in this article Bertolini mentions five different criteria that he suggests using to evaluate the effectiveness of street experiments. Are they radical, are they challenge driven, are they feasible, are they strategic, and are they communicative? And I suggest that you read the paper for a detailed explanation of how these five different criterias can be applied to street experiments. It might be interesting for you to note that these five criteria is actually borrowed from the social technical transition studies. And if you're interested in how government can institute change and how change happens, I think you would find transition studies as a field perhaps quite interesting for you, and perhaps you can give that a google. So to sum up, Bertolini categorizes these different types of street experiments in terms of their functional complexity. The paper remarks that something simpler for example, the remarketing of streets could be achieved in shorter time spans and are more conducive to, let's say bottom up tactical urbanism as compared to shutting down an entire street per se. He sums up by saying that the key challenge seems to be finding ways to not just tolerate but rather proactively shape institutional and physical space for experimentation and from learning from it. So whatever perspective you're coming to this course from, I think you'll find this paper extremely interesting. In the first part, you'll get an overview of the different types of street experiments that people have conducted. And if you're more interested in the policy change aspect, I encourage you to read on to section three, where the assessment framework has provided. Quite a bit of work has also gone into finding the various examples included in this paper. So if you're interested about how things are done around the world, definitely check out the different tables spread throughout the paper. So, enjoy the read and I'll see you at the next lecture.
