Our dependence on cars is damaging our health ― and the planet’s. The Dutch seem to have the right idea, with thousands of bike highways, but even then, what happens to pedestrians or people who want to cycle at a more leisurely pace? What about children playing outside their homes? Or wildlife, which enriches our local areas? Why do we prioritise traffic above all else? Making our communities safer, cleaner, and greener starts with asking the fundamental questions: who do our streets belong to, what do we use them for, and who gets to decide? This book challenge us to rethink our way of life to put people at the centre of urban design. But be warned: you will never look at the street outside your front door in the same way again.

Are transition to low carbon mobility just? Who can or cannot adopt and benefit from low-carbon forms of mobility? Tim Schwanen discusses the issue of justice applied to transition to low carbon mobility and emphasis the role in studying interdependent capabilities, enabling involved and affected constituencies to participate in governance and knowledge generation, and creating conditions that enable marginalized perspectives and experiences to shift transition pathways towards low-carbon mobility in previously unimaginable directions.

Peter Norton narrates the complex and passionate debates that cleared the street to make way for the car in USA between 1915 and 1930. These decisions made decades ago still shape our cities, so they are vital to understanding the future of the automobile, as well as its past. Fighting Traffic offers a new look at both the origins of the automotive city in America and how social groups shape technological change.

Classic book showing how motorized traffic kills the social function of city streets, and what might be needed to revert the trend. Still relevant! An updated, 2020 version (‘Livable streets 2.0’) is also available.

Book chapter documenting how around the 1920s in the USA the norm of streets was deliberately shifted from a place of multiple uses and users to one where motorized traffic is and should be the dominant one. This is the very paradigm that street experiments are currently contesting.

Book chapter emphasizing the many different potential uses and users of city streets and showing how order can emerge from mutual negotiations between them, rather than from rules imposed from above. A possibility that current street experiments are also exploring.

Journal article about the different, both symbiotic and conflicting, and always evolving uses of city streets, and about how this raises topical questions for urban planning.

Classic book vividly illustrating and passionately arguing for why and how public space design should shift its focus from the enablement of traffic to that of social interactions. A key source of inspiration of many current street experiments.

Creation of a pedestrian zone in Brussels and its impact on a wide range of areas (housing, mobility, accessibility

About Leefstraten and the effect they may have in the wider story of gentrification.