Birmingham pedestrians and Public Space

The city of Birmingham, formerly a car-centric industrial city, has tranformed its central core into a pedestrian-friendly neighbourhood of pleasing public spaces. Ben Plowden, Director of the Pedestrians Association in England (imagine a nation-wide association of walkers!), writes about this transformation in opendemocracy.net’s urban forum. This forum also includes interesting articles and a lively debate on urban planning and architecture from some of Britain’s leading commentators on these issues.

Check out as well the article “How you travel is who you are“, which muses on the way in which people’s notions of status discourage walking as a form of transportation. It also points out that our system spends vastly more on subsidizing long journeys than on enabling short ones, and asks, why? It’s a very good point:

An interesting philosophical question [is] why traffic planners invariably attribute greater importance to long journeys than shorter ones — which they most certainly do. The sheer amount of money spent per user-journey on motorway and air infrastructure, is, I suspect, rather more than that spent per user-journey on city streets, pavements [sidewalks], minor roads, or cycle-paths.