Shaping healthy high streets through walkability and sociability
Laura Vaughan and Adriana Ortegon, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture and the Healthy Urban Places project
High streets are fundamental to everyday life, providing access to healthcare, community services, retail, and social and civic institutions. As such, they have the potential to support health by enabling routine movement, access to essential resources, and opportunities for social interaction.
This presentation examines how the health-promoting role of high streets has evolved over time and identifies the spatial characteristics that enable or constrain it. Drawing on longitudinal evidence from eight high streets in Bradford and Liverpool (UK), we explore how health-supportive spatial conditions have been assembled, transformed, retained, or lost over the past 120 years.
We present a methodological approach that combines geospatial analysis of street-network centrality of the contemporary state (using space syntax measures of integration and choice) with historical urban morphology and land-use analysis. This enables us to quantify long-term changes in building footprint, frontage length, land-use density and diversity, and relate these to the evolving role of high streets within local and city-scale movement networks.
Our findings suggest that the long-term sustainability of high streets depends on their capacity to adapt while maintaining the spatial qualities that support everyday life. In particular, we demonstrate how the interaction between street-network configuration and built form has shaped the evolution of fine-grained, diverse land-use patterns that promote walkability, sociability, and access to services.
Finally, we argue that understanding these urban design processes can inform health and low-carbon transport strategies. High streets naturally attract large numbers of everyday trips because of their accessibility and concentration of destinations. However, whether these trips are undertaken on foot, by bicycle, public transport, or by car depends not only on transport provision but also on the design of the local environment – and its evolution – through time. Planning high streets as fine-grained, walkable, and socially active places can therefore contribute simultaneously to healthier populations and more sustainable, low-carbon mobility. Indeed, transport planning, as Christopher Martin has recently suggested, needs to be treated as the “mechanism through which social and economic opportunities are produced.” Failing to consider accessibility on foot in the first instance, is likely to reduce people’s quality of life.