Last week, I traveled with our group by train from Copenhagen to the town of Odense in the Danish countryside. We’ve been talking about (and seeing in action) many concepts related to cycling infrastructure and public life, but on this trip the idea of streets as public spaces really hit home for me.
We’d already studied how streets have changed in the last century from being a public, multimodal thoroughfare to being used for only one thing: cars. Entire cities have been redesigned to get as many vehicles moving as quickly as possible through our roads, while pedestrians and cyclists have become inconveniences.
We lost so much on the way to becoming a nation for cars, and one of the most significant of those losses, I’m realizing, is so much public space. Our streets are owned by all of us, because we all pay for them. It may not have been uncommon at one time in our history to see, along with cyclists and drivers, kids playing in the street or neighbors meeting and exchanging pleasantries over the pavement. Some cities, my home of Siloam Springs included, have experimented with reclaiming the streets temporarily for special events; but by and large we have ceded our streets to be used by and for the car alone.
Odense is a case study in the opposite. With a population of 200,000, it is the third-largest city in Denmark; although I heard it referred to multiple times as “small” and “charming,” which are both adjectives people use to describe my lovely little town of 15,000 as well. The city center has bustling streets that accommodate fast-speed cars, buses, cyclists, and pedestrians each with impressive dedicated lanes. But just around the corner, we also saw a beautiful old residential area whose narrow streets need no separated lanes and function as all-user space. Our group of 20 cyclists stopped in the middle of the street for 10 minutes to marvel and ponder, and we were mostly undisturbed.
A bit further down the road, we explored another small neighborhood. I heard someone ask, “What is this place?” and our group leader Martha responded, “It’s a street, but it’s also a playground.” Sure enough, half the street was a playground. Bright paint created games on the pavement, bright orange pedestals in differing heights rose like mushrooms in one area, and steel ping pong tables painted with murals stood in another. We parked our bikes and played. The play structures also functioned as traffic calming, and it wasn’t long before a van passed us on the street at a crawl. This relatively narrow street is being used, adequately and safely, for pedestrians, cyclists, cars AND children playing.
Experiencing a city that has effectively reclaimed its streets as multimodal public spaces was an electric shock. A new world of creativity, public engagement, outdoor recreation, wellness, and diverse transportation options is open to us. This applies both to small towns and large cities, especially because we can start with the neighborhood street!
