Ah, the street. You have been so maligned.
It's tough out there on the street. You need street smarts. And so on. I mean to illustrate that there is a cognitive and linguistic trend to consider the street to be dangerous, undesirable, or otherwise other. In our perceptions the street has been constructed as a place of drug-dealing, prostitution, malingerling, and other objects of dubious moral outrage.
But the street shouldn't be thought of as a bad thing. In fact, it's the best thing. The street is the basic unit of the public sphere. It both connects us and provides us with a meeting place. I look down my own street, Lawrence Street, and think about how it was established as an old Roman road. Probably bits of it predate even that. From then it has broadly persisted, for all these years, through successive governments and nations. The street remains. Every generation saw fit to keep up its maintainance, because it was so valuable to them. If you tot it up, it's probably the most expensive thing for some distance (although it is likely rivalled by some other streets). It turns into Hull Road, which predictably enough will take you to Hull and the sea. If you follow it into town it has many names, but it's really the same street, and it takes you all the way past the Minster, and then all the way to Thirsk if you want to think of it like that. Romantically perhaps, I like to imagine pilgrims traveling to the Minster along this road, but that probably doesn't make much sense because I don't think it was that major a pilgrimage destination and there is a perfectly servicable river you could travel along.
Within settlements, anything of much value is likely to be on a street. All of our great public spaces: the squares and libraries and all that sort of thing; are arrayed along them like beads of precious stone on a web of golden threads. It is a democratic space, in the sense that it is, even now, a space used for debate and protest, but also in the sense that it is near universally accessible. Street trading is a way of making a living (well, trying to) where the barriers to entry are low. I don't know how it is these days, but for me it is easy to imagine in times past street hawkers graduating into loftier business enterprises. It is an incubator, and an enabler. These qualities that make it attractive to the peddler and the busker also increase its appeal to those whose enterprises find less favour with the law. Some of this may be reality, some is likely to be reputation alone. I suspect that nowadays most drug-dealing and prostitution take place in buildings, for instance.
On two occasions in my travels about the European continent, it was in this public space that I, wearing the apparel and general demeanor of a traveler, was approached by genial strangers with an offer of free lodgings. Both times I accepted and it turned out great, by the way. Charities looking to raise some funds have taken to the streets, as have beggars. The street is therefore also a site of anonymous generosity and community solidarity.
The automobile has changed things somewhat. Although in a place like York there is a large and broadly pedestrianised core, most streets have their choicest parts colonised by private cars. This is a subversion of all that has previously been said of the street. By enclosing oneself in a bubular private sphere within the street, one is also in some senses impoverishing it. Indeed the presumption of a priority for cars in street traffic is somewhat counterintuitive. For within-city travel, there is usually an alternative with fewer negative externalities, and for inter-city travel we tend to use not so much streets as roads. I don't know if there is a formal distinction, but I am sure my meaning is recieved.
But, pardon the pun, this is the path we're on. And there is something to be said for rapid private transportation - there is nothing like it for getting the shopping home. I still do look about, however, for chances to reclaim the street for the public interest. Experiments in shared spaces are a promising lead, wherein priority in the road is not heirarchically arranged but is the result of on the spot negotiation. This has been shown to reduce traffic fatalities, which reinforces my conception of conventional road traffic as suffering from a kind of collective sociopathy. There is no necessity or law of nature bringing about this state of affairs: vehicular privelege is a gift from the public and it can be taken away. It ought not be taken for granted.
I remember when I was in Nairobi, the busiest of roads were a kind of open market, as hawkers would descend anarchically upon our dearly congested. Now I don't want to insensitively romanticise the poverty that led people into busy traffic to try to make ends meet (or understate the inconvenience of somebody trying to sell you something while you are trying to drive), but the illustration does capture one thing: that the street is the cauldron of a creative chaos that is well worth encouraging, and treasuring. Appreciate your street.
