Street
It is a public parcel of land adjoining buildings in an urban or suburban context, on which people may freely assemble, interact, and move about.
A street can be as simple as a level patch of dirt, but is more often paved with a hard, durable surface such as tarmac, concrete, cobblestone or brick.
Later it acquired a dialectical meaning of "straggling village", which were often laid out on the verges of Roman roads and these settlements often became named Stretton.
[6] Streets have their roots to antiquity in ancient roads or trade routes, designed for practical purposes like transportation, commerce or defense.
In many cities, streets may have originated as paths through wilderness or were shaped by natural features like rivers, hills or the coastline.
Streets became centers for commerce, trade and industrial activity, leading to the construction of factories, warehouses and transportation hubs.
For example, certain streets may have become known for their vibrant cultural or artistic scenes or for being focal points during political protests or social movements.
[citation needed] In the 20th and 21st centuries, streets probably underwent major transformations with the advent of automobiles, public transport systems and urban planning policies.
As a component of the built environment as ancient as human habitation, the street sustains a range of activities vital to civilization.
The unrestricted movement of people and goods within a city is essential to its commerce and vitality, and streets provide the physical space for this activity.
This is usually done by carving a road through the middle for motorists, reserving pavements on either side for pedestrians; other arrangements allow for streetcars, trolleys, and even wastewater and rainfall runoff ditches (common in Japan and India).
In the mid-20th century, as the automobile threatened to overwhelm city streets with pollution and ghastly accidents, many urban theorists came to see this segregation as not only helpful but necessary in order to maintain mobility.
Le Corbusier, for one, perceived an ever-stricter segregation of traffic as an essential affirmation of social order—a desirable, and ultimately inevitable, expression of modernity.
To this end, proposals were advanced to build "vertical streets" where road vehicles, pedestrians, and trains would each occupy their own levels.
Rather, vertical segregation is applied on a piecemeal basis, as in sewers, utility poles, depressed highways, elevated railways, common utility ducts, the extensive complex of underground malls surrounding Tokyo Station and the Ōtemachi subway station, the elevated pedestrian skyway networks of Minneapolis and Calgary, the underground cities of Atlanta and Montreal, and the multilevel streets in Chicago.
These measures are often taken in a city's busiest areas, the "destination" districts, when the volume of activity outgrows the capacity of private passenger vehicles to support it.
A feature universal to all streets is a human-scale design that gives its users the space and security to feel engaged in their surroundings, whatever through traffic may pass.
Jane Jacobs, an economist and prominent urbanist, wrote extensively on the ways that interaction among the people who live and work on a particular street—"eyes on the street"—can reduce crime, encourage the exchange of ideas, and generally make the world a better place.
Madison Avenue and Fleet Street are so strongly identified with their respective most famous types of commerce, that their names are sometimes applied to firms located elsewhere.
The 1,000 oak trees lining Grand Boulevard were planted in 1916 by Sally Humphreys Gwin, a charter member of the Greenwood Garden Club.
In 1950, Gwin received a citation from the National Congress of the Daughters of the American Revolution in recognition of her work in the conservation of trees.
East 9th Street in Manhattan, for example, offers a cluster of Japanese restaurants, clothing stores, and cultural venues.
[12] Buskers, beggars, boulevardiers, patrons of pavement cafés, peoplewatchers, streetwalkers, and a diversity of other characters are habitual users of a street; the same people would not typically be found on a road.
Still, even here, what is called a "street" is usually a smaller thoroughfare, such as a road within a housing development feeding directly into individual driveways.
In the last half of the 20th century planners of suburban streets often abandoned the tradition of a rigid, rectangular grid, and instead designed systems to discourage through-traffic.
Adolescent suburbanites find, in attenuated form, the amenities of street life in shopping malls where vehicles are forbidden.
In Auckland in New Zealand, for example, the main shopping precinct is located around Queen Street and Karangahape Road.
For instance, a New York Times writer lets casually slip the observation that automobile-laden Houston Street, in lower Manhattan, is "a street that can hardly be called 'street' anymore, transformed years ago into an eight-lane raceway that alternately resembles a Nascar event and a parking lot.
"[14] Published in the paper's Metro section, the article evidently presumes an audience with an innate grasp of the modern urban role of the street.
At least one map has been made to illustrate the geography of naming conventions for thoroughfares - comparing and contrasting "avenue", "boulevard", "circle", "road", "street", and other labels.
