Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-4rdpn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-10-31T23:21:02.391Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

2 - A Recent History of the Street

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

William Riggs
Affiliation:
University of San Francisco
Get access

Summary

She had always been fond of history, and here was history in the stones of the street and the atoms of the sunshine. (Henry James, 1917, p 301)

If we are to better understand how the street can be shaped for livability and human interaction, it is helpful to start with a basic understanding of how streets have evolved over the past few centuries. In that sense, the first thing that may come to mind when considering this history might be the cart paths that facilitated trade in medieval Europe and the Middle East or perhaps the dusty road outside a saloon from a glamorized American Western movie. While there may be lessons to learn from these visions of the street, the origins of the modern street stem largely from the urbanization and industrialization following the industrial revolution and post-war reconstruction periods (Boyer, 1986). Given that, this discussion begins at the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century and the creation of the modern engineered street.

This beginning does not discount the many different forms that a road can take, and I fully realize that the experience of an organized, paved, modern road is not necessarily one that all can say they have. When I was a boy growing up in a rural and poor community near Louisville, Kentucky, seeing an unpaved dirt or gravel road was not uncommon, and this kind of “un-engineered” street is still common in many places around the globe. I have strong memories of walking down dirt roads surrounded on both sides by beautiful fields of corn standing four to six feet high and extending far into the horizon until they met the hills of the Ohio River Valley.

As discussed earlier, after college, I had the opportunity to teach in a village on the outskirts of Arusha, Tanzania, and had a similar experience to what I had already had in Kentucky. Each day my friend Nathaniel and I walked from the house that we had rented to the school where we were working on a dirt street that was flanked by fields of corn.

Type
Chapter
Information
End of the Road
Reimagining the Street as the Heart of the City
, pp. 16 - 27
Publisher: Bristol University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×