A Pattern Language

Green Streets (51)

Problem

There is too much hot hard asphalt in the world. A local road, which only gives access to buildings, needs a few stones for the wheels of the cars; nothing more. Most of it can still be green.

Solution

On local roads, closed to through traffic, plant grass all over the road and set occasional paving stones into the grass to form a surface for the wheels of those cars that need access to the street. Make no distinction between street and sidewalk. Where houses open off the street, put in more paving stones or gravel to let cars turn onto their own land.

… this pattern helps to give the character of local roads. Even though it only defines the surface of the road, and the position of parking, the gradual emergency of this pattern in an area, can be used, piecemeal, to create Looped Local Roads (49), T Junctions (50), and Common Land (67). This pattern was inspired by a beautiful road in the north of Denmark, built by Anne-Marie Rubin.

When a road is a green street, it so pleasant that it naturally tends to attract activity to it. In this case, the paths and the green streets are one — Common Land (67). However, even when the green street is green, it may be pleasant to put in occasional very small lanes, a few feet wide, at right angles to the green streets, according to the Network of Paths and Cars (52). In order to preserve the greenness of the street, it will be essential, too, to keep parked cars in driveways on the individual lots, or in tiny parking lots, at the ends of the street, reserved for the house owners and their visitors — Small Parking Lots (103). Fruit trees and flowers will make the street more beautiful — Fruit Trees (170), Raised Flowers (245) — and the paving stones which form the beds for cars to drive on, can themselves be laid with cracks between them and with grass and moss and flowers in the cracks between the stones — Paving With Cracks Between the Stones (247) …

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