TfL is looking to spend more money on healthy streets initiatives in the outer London boroughs as commuter trips change and following a period of investment on low traffic neighbourhoods and cycle routes in inner London. In New York, meanwhile, recent experiences with Covid’s impact on the city’s public realm have allowed it to put more emphasis on public streets to serve its local communities.

Those were just some of the points to emerge from NYLON – a live webinar hook-up between London and New York run by NLA – which this time focused on Healthy Streets as its topic.

The view on a redistribution of funding came from Lucy Marstrand-Taussig of TfL who described her initial fears over accusations of ‘gentrification’, but which were allayed by the finding that most of the low traffic schemes were in underprivileged areas. But now that commuting principles have changed, so would the focus to look at more outer borough streets, she said and different types of trips – to school and shops, for example. ‘And inevitably that means spending more money in the outer boroughs’, she said. ‘That may be something New York also has to address. I wouldn’t say it has been a problem focusing on the commute but we need to look beyond the commute’.

‘Creating bike paths is a long, dedicated process’, said KPF’s Bruce Fisher on New York’s latter-day transformation. ‘In the case of our bike paths in New York it's been a 40 year-plus process & it's really in the last decade that it's really taken hold‘. There has never been a better time to measure design and how we can make streets function in a good way, and build ‘purpose-built’ streets for new public functions, he added. But one strategy does not fit all – they are nuanced, multi-layered phenomena.

Guillermo Gomez, director of programmes at the Urban Design Forum said it had been thinking ‘really deeply’ about the role of public space and streets in achieving healthier neighbourhoods. ‘in New York we know that the outcomes of the pandemic have really glaringly showed how place and space impacts health’, he said. In particular, the design of freight and transportation networks had had an adverse impact on public health, particularly black neighbourhoods and with high asthma rates. ‘Although COVID-19 left us with such an incredible loss in New York City and across the globe. We're starting to experiment with new ways to activate our city streets’.

In the UK, meanwhile, the UK’s economic performance – much in scrutiny currently – is closely tied to our streets, said TfL’s Alexander Baldwin-Smith, with high street walking, cycling and public realm improvements increasing retail sales by up to 30%. And every single journey made in London starts and ends on a street, he added, with over 80% if all journeys made by Londoners taking place entirely on London’s street network. What we must do, though, is reduce the dominance of the car and make walking cyclin and buses much more attractive, he added.

Rethinking streets, as HOK is doing on projects like the Bollo Lane scheme in Acton is key, said the practice’s David Weatherhead, thinking of streets as healthy communities where buildings play just a part in making the wellness environment. ‘It doesn’t take much to have a big impact’, he said. ‘I think we can have a huge impact on everyone’s wellness if we care’.

In New York, said Jenna Miller of NYC Public Design Commission, streets comprise over a quarter of the city’s land area. ‘It really goes to show that streetscapes are arguably one of the city’s most readily accessed and underutilised public resources’, she said. Covid had certainly put the public realm’s importance into major perspective. ‘The pandemic accelerated the process of making the link between equity and design of our public realm. It taught us that small interventions can have major impacts, and that anyone can shape their streets’.

Ultimately, though, city streets are public spaces, said Jennifer Nitzky of Studio HIP, presenting a case study in a wellness publication – a community driven healthier green corridor solution for a school street in Manhattan. ‘They belong to everybody’, she said. ‘The design of streetscapes really need to involve the community that uses them’