This article is based on my notes for a presentation delivered at the MADE Actions for Design Excellence event in September 2009
For ten or more years urban designers have talked about ‘continuity & enclosure’ as a positive quality of place. It’s a piece of jargon that is baffling to the layperson and to many fellow professionals. Why should places be continuous and enclosed?
What we really mean is we need more real streets. In fact we can distil all the principles of urban design down to one simple injunction: create and maintain real streets.
The places that we love, the places that we like to visit on holidays and day trips are characterised by real streets and the most enduringly successful urban forms are streets. What is the best way of designing a convivial neighbourhood? By creating a traditional pattern of residential streets.
In some of our most deprived communities, there are places that flourish despite the poverty of local populations: these are the high streets. And yet when we redesign these communities we ignore this evidence and create the same ‘mini-precincts’ that have failed in the past.
Many of the cities and towns in our region are characterised by large areas in which there are no real streets, where the environment is dominated by highways, car parks, big sheds set in space, random housing layouts, left over space. The more deprived and problematic the area, the fewer real streets they tend to have. And where there are streets, they are often disconnected.
So what do we need to do:

1. Planning policy and regeneration strategies need to recognise the importance of streets, to map where there are strong streets and where the street pattern is weak and put in place policies to create and maintain real streets.
2. Local authorities need to put someone (preferably with a design background) in charge of their streets with powers to get different departments and teams working together for better streets, to influence planning, control the actions of utilities, intervene to de-clutter and manage the maintenance of streets.
3. All new developments should contribute to reinforcing streets. In simple terms that means buildings facing the street and putting the car park round the back.

The public realm is the space we all share, it is where society and community and neighbourhood happens and the vast majority of the public realm is streets. Get streets right and the rest follows.