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Case Study - Urban Design

A new approach to urban street planning and design

Professor Peter Jones's research at UCL on transport and spatial design found that urban street design has been dominated by the needs of motorised vehicles. The insufficient attention paid to other street user needs leads to a poor physical street environment and unattractive public spaces.

Together with Dr Stephen Marshall, Professor Jones responded to this by developing Link and Place, a new set of principles for urban street planning and design. These principles take into account the movement needs of all street users (Link), as well as the various economic, social and cultural activities that take place on and adjacent to the street (Place).

The first major UK application of the Link and Place concept was in 2009 in the London Borough of Hounslow, where the council won £650m through the private finance initiative (PFI) to upgrade and maintain the borough's highway network over a 25-year period. The council cited the novel application of Link and Place as one of the reasons for its success in bidding for that funding amid stiff competition from other local authorities. The new approach has since been incorporated into national guidelines on urban planning developed by the Departments for Transport and for Communities and Local Government (Manual for Streets 2, 2010).

The Link and Place concept is also being applied internationally, including in Hungary, Switzerland, Ireland, China, New Zealand, Australia and the USA. For example, the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design in 2013 incorporated the approach into the draft regulations for urban road space.

Professor Jones was subsequently involved in the development of Moving and Place, a modified version of Link and Place designed to recognise better the range of diversity in street functions and, consequently, in the priorities and design solutions to be applied. Moving and Place featured at the heart of the report of London's Roads Task Force (on which Professor Jones sat) and Transport for London now requires boroughs' use of it when submitting funding proposals for new street schemes. The approach is already being used in a £3m scheme to upgrade the street environment in Hornchurch.