Landscape Strategies

In urban neighborhoods, the street serves as an important public space. The elements of successful streets and their arrangement are key to creating good neighborhoods. Elements include appropriately sized streets, street trees, public sidewalks, private walk connections, front yards and porches. Successful streets and front yards overlap, allowing the street to become public space cared for by residents. Successful streets encourage walking and offer a sense of safety.

• Streets should follow the principles of Complete Streets, which means that we would allow for use by cars, buses, bicycles and pedestrians.
• Street trees increase the comfort, safety and beauty of streets and are perhaps the most important landscape component. Where the right-of-way width or utilities do not allow for planting trees in the verge, alternatives include planting trees in front lawns, finding other locations in enlarged verge areas, and the use of smaller trees to avoid utilities. Street trees are ideally located between road and sidewalk in the verge to separate pedestrians from cars.
• Sidewalks should be sized based on housing density, continuous street to street, and connected by marked crosswalks at busy intersections.
• The front yard is critical to building quality public spaces. Pedestrian walks should connect houses to the public sidewalk through the yard. Driveways should not serve as primary pedestrian access. Front yards should be designed to be used to encourage interaction with neighbors.
• Porches serve as a transition from private to public space providing critical eyes on public space. Porches should be large enough and comfortable to encourage use.