Notes on walkable cities, quiet streets and the spaces between buildings.
Width is the first number a traffic engineer reaches for and the last one a pedestrian notices. The streets people remember are rarely the wide ones. A short look at enclosure ratios, building lines and why twelve metres between facades often feels more generous than forty.
Temporary seating in parking lanes was meant to last a summer. Some of it never left. Which installations survived, who maintains them, and what the survivors have in common.
Count the seconds you wait at a signal and you learn who a street was built for. Notes from a month of timing pedestrian phases, refuge islands and the long detours to the nearest underpass.
The idea became a slogan, then a controversy, then a checklist. Stripped back to its origins, it is mostly about corner shops, school routes and benches. A plain-language reading of what the concept does and does not promise.
Many port cities sit next to water they cannot reach. Former docklands, rail sidings and customs zones leave long fenced edges behind. How a few cities opened theirs up, one gate at a time.
Slow Streets Journal is a small, independent collection of essays on urban form, street design and everyday public space. No ads, no tracking, no newsletter pop-ups. New pieces appear roughly once a month.