Avenues or Arterials: The Struggle to Change Street Building Practices in Toronto, Canada

This paper explores why Toronto's policies for improving pedestrian conditions are not better reflected in the design of arterial streets as the city tries to refashion them into pedestrian-oriented ‘Avenues’. Professional frameworks shaping street design date from the first half of the 20th century and reflect a consensus between the fields of planning and engineering. Recently, this consensus has broken down in terms of the design of arterial streets. The role of engineering standards in this story has been told, but this study also examines how other institutionalized practices continue to operate making design changes difficult. Understanding why this occurs has lessons beyond Toronto and is intended to help cities to better match street-making practices to new visions of pedestrian-oriented streets.

[1]  C. Lindblom.  THE SCIENCE OF MUDDLING THROUGH , 1959 .

[2]  Susan L Handy,et al.  How the built environment affects physical activity: views from urban planning. , 2002, American journal of preventive medicine.

[3]  W. Green,et al.  Health and Community Design: The Impact of the Built Environment on Physical Activity by Lawrence D. Frank, Peter Engelke and Thomas Schmid , 2004 .

[4]  P. Healey,et al.  A Sociological Institutionalist Approach to the Study of Innovation in Governance Capacity , 2005 .

[5]  P. Hall,et al.  Political Science and the Three New Institutionalisms , 1996 .

[6]  P. Pierson.  Politics in Time: History, Institutions, and Social Analysis , 2004 .

[7]  A. Duany,et al.  Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream , 2000 .

[8]  J. Sallis,et al.  Neighborhood-based differences in physical activity: an environment scale evaluation. , 2003, American journal of public health.

[9]  J. Jacobs.  The Death and Life of Great American Cities , 1962 .

[10]  D. L. Johnson.  Origin of the Neighbourhood Unit , 2002 .

[11]  M. Southworth,et al.  Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities , 1996 .

[12]  S. Raudenbush,et al.  Relationship between Urban Sprawl and Physical Activity, Obesity, and Morbidity , 2003, American journal of health promotion : AJHP.

[13]  Jeffrey Brown,et al.  From Traffic Regulation to Limited Ways: The Effort to Build a Science of Transportation Planning , 2006 .

[14]  A. Loukaitou-Sideris,et al.  Constructing the sidewalks: municipal government and the production of public space in Los Angeles, California, 1880–1920 , 2007 .

[15]  B. Peters.  Institutional Theory in Political Science: The New Institutionalism , 1999 .

[16]  A. Moudon,et al.  Effects of Site Design on Pedestrian Travel in Mixed-Use, Medium-Density Environments , 1997 .

[17]  C. Mcshane,et al.  To engineer the metropolis: sewers, sanitation, and city planning in late-nineteenth-century America. , 1978, Journal of American history.

[18]  James Howard Kunstler,et al.  The geography of nowhere : the rise and decline of America's man - made landscape , 1993 .

[19]  Patsy Healey,et al.  The new institutionalism and the transformative goals of planning , 2007 .

[20]  Allan B. Jacobs,et al.  The Boulevard Book: History, Evolution, Design of Multiway Boulevards , 2001 .

[21]  R. Untermann.  ACCOMMODATING THE PEDESTRIAN: ADAPTING TOWNS AND NEIGHBOURHOODS FOR WALKING AND BICYCLING , 1984 .

[22]  Anthony Woodlief,et al.  The Path-Dependent City , 1998 .

[23]  Vivien Lowndes,et al.  Rescuing Aunt Sally: Taking Institutional Theory Seriously in Urban Politics , 2001 .

[24]  Stephen Marshall,et al.  ARTISTS - Arterial streets for people: Guidance for planners and decision makers when reconstructing arterial streets. , 2004 .

[25]  Michael Hebbert,et al.  Engineering, Urbanism and the Struggle for Street Design , 2005 .

[26]  Wolfgang Streeck,et al.  Introduction: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies , 2005 .

[27]  Eran Ben-Joseph,et al.  Street Standards and the Shaping of Suburbia , 1995 .

[28]  Reid Ewing.  FROM HIGHWAY TO MY WAY. , 2001 .

[29]  K. Thelen.  Historical Institutionalism in comparative politics , 1997 .

[30]  S. Bocking.  Constructing Urban Expertise , 2006 .

[31]  Jason W Patton,et al.  A Pedestrian World: Competing Rationalities and the Calculation of Transportation Change , 2007 .

[32]  E. Immergut.  The Theoretical Core of the New Institutionalism , 1998 .

[33]  Michael Southworth,et al.  The Evolving Metropolis: Studies of Community, Neighborhood, and Street Form at the Urban Edge , 1993 .

[34]  J. Fairfield.  The Scientific Management of Urban Space , 1994 .