Hold Me, Squeeze Me

When it comes to placemaking, more space isn't always better

Sometime last week I came across photos of Iftar — the meal that breaks the Ramadan fast— in Cairo. Since around 2014, the El Matareya neighborhood has put on a communal Iftar that has ballooned from a few families to feeding over 25,000 people. Volunteers cook bulk dishes of spiced rice and shish tawook while individual neighbors contribute specialty dishes and desserts to pile onto 500 tables covering 1km of streets. Photos don’t really do the scale justice. The tables run for many blocks.

Weirdly, it reminded me of something I’d seen with my own eyes in Sevilla. During Corpus Christi the congregations of the city’s churches hoist floats and religious icons through the streets while volunteers hand out bushels of Rosemary and fragrant herbs. It’s much more parade-like than Cairo’s Iftar, but there is a big meal at the end in the town square. Again, my photos don’t really do it justice.

The outfits are amazing. This boy is probably unhappy because it’s 103 degrees and he’s in a lace collar.

What unites these two religious displays from cities thousands of miles apart is that they both happen on narrow streets. Big displays of public activity are often reserved for squares, plazas, and parks. Parades tend to happen down big boulevards. All New York City’s parades happen on 5th ave, Broadway, or Eastern Parkway, with the very notable exception of Lunar New Year which still happens in the claustrophobic streets of Chinatown and I think is all the more exciting because of it.

Narrow, claustrophobic streets sound bad, but people generally like to be squeezed tight by the spaces they inhabit. We’re the same animals who nested in trees and caves. Like many predators, our eyes face forward and we have a narrow field of view. We are relatively bad at seeing around us but we’re great at seeing straight ahead, and something in our lizard brain feels more comfortable when we can see the action right in front of us. The mob boss likes to sit with his back to the wall so no one can sneak up behind him and he can survey the action. Next time you’re in a large populated space like a plaza, notice how few people sit smack in the middle, most people will arrange themselves on the corners and edges.

Narrow streets leverage this biological quirk by catering to what urban designers and architects call our sense of enclosure - the perception of being bounded or surrounded. We may say we want lots of room and clear sky but study after study has shown that perceptions of safety and comfort increase when we’re penned in a little bit. Streets, with their walls of buildings bounding your view to the sky and ground, can provide this satisfaction to varying degrees. Some designers have gotten quite specific about this, especially as it relates to how narrow or wide streets let in more or less sky. Here is a guide from the Scottish government showing ideal street widths.

The ideal width of the street changes depending on how tall the buildings are. Streets with taller buildings should be wider to let in the same proportion of sky. Low-rise streets can be narrow since the shorter buildings don’t block out the sky. I’m not sure where these ratios come from, and it doesn’t take a lot of effort to poke holes in them. Here is the view towards Trinty Church on Wall Street which I’ve written about before. It is very narrow for how tall the buildings are, and it’s quite popular.

Here is the Shambles in York, an incredibly narrow and low-rise street that blocks out the entire sky and is still picturesque.

The point is, I think it’s less about some magical ratio and more about narrowness period. Narrowness works not because of what it does for our perception of the sky or other buildings, but what it does for our interactions with people. Seeing each other up close, speaking to one another, and the ability of a relatively small group to fill a space is why narrow streets are perfect for public life. Jan Gehl has developed a scale of distance based not on the sky or building height, but on human interaction. Gehl drew on research to determine the optimal distances for different types of social interaction, such as speaking and looking. People can’t hear each other beyond 100 ft, but 23 ft is ideal for conversation. People can visually make out faces and expressions up to around 325 ft. Edward T. Hall describes Social Distance (no, not that social distance) as around 12 ft, the optimal distance for conversation among friends and neighbors.

I don’t think it’s surprising that places that embrace narrowness are known for streetlife, even when there isn’t a parade or religious festival on. Here is one of Melbourne’s famous laneways, the diners could easily throw food at each other.

If there is a modern city that completely embraces narrow streets it’s probably Tokyo.

I can think of a handful of contemporary developments that have really embraced narrowness to good effect. Many of them are more like arcades than actual streets, but what is an arcade anyway besides a street with a roof? Here is the Bloomberg Passage in London.

You’ll notice a lot of food, beverage, and retail in these examples. Narrowness puts people in close contact with each other but also with the ground floor. The obvious absence of cars is also good for business, and despite what your local chamber of commerce might say, pedestrianized streets generate more footfall and thus revenue than car-accessible ones.

With so many good examples and with enclosure being a relatively basic concept in architecture, it’s amazing how often we get this wrong. Architects tend to go for monumentality and openness over intimacy. This isn’t quite a street, but my first impression of Battersea Power Station was how empty it felt even though it was full of hundreds of people. The stores are separated by gapping expanses, and everything seems to cower under the vast ceilings. So much of the experience is about beholding the scale of the space, which works in the Tate Modern (another turbine hall) when the point is to be impressed and showcase huge art, but feels off in a mall setting.

Even proponents of walkability and complete streets often end up advocating for wide, heavily designed roads that are expensive to plan and create (although well-intentioned and effective when done).

This is a good reminder that narrowness, besides being socially pleasurable, is good for walkability. Besides the obvious benefit of putting everything a little closer to the pedestrian, studies show that cars naturally slow down on narrow, congested streets without the need for bumps, paint, or barriers. The Dutch have codified this into a street typology called a Woonerf, where pedestrian and car space is completely blended on a narrow street.

The firm Perkins Eastman recently applied this to their masterplan in the Wharf District of Washington DC, channeling cars into narrow, twisting spaces that are shared with pedestrians. It’s worked quite well.

The social potential of a place is partially determined by its intimacy, and in a “loneliness epidemic,’ intimacy is something we should be creating more of. Narrowness is one strategy and a fairly simple one at that. It’s nice to run through a field or take in an expansive view but at the end of the day, we’re just higher-order apes looking for shelter and a good chat.