Streetscapes are a 24-hour publicly accessible landscape that most people engage with on a daily basis – yet many would not consider them landscapes at all. A Polish study that explored the shift in university students’ perceptions of different types of landscapes before and after COVID-19 lockdowns highlighted that the word “landscape” seems to be synonymous with green space, despite streetscape arguably being the most heavily used type of landscape during lockdown periods.1
There are many good reasons why one of our most-used landscapes tends to not be perceived as a landscape – but perhaps one key reason is its design. In Australian cities, the primary function of streets ishave 1.2-metre-wide paved foot paths that make them an ideal environment for pedestrians with a range of abilities. Georges-Eugene Haussmann’s redesign of Paris’s streetscapes undertaken in 1853 still seems to dictate streetscape design more than 170 years later, with repetitive and linear forms and a monoculture of tree species spaced equidistantly from each other, failing to acknowledge each site’s particular variables of aspect, powerlines and topography.2 This rigid adherence to symmetry and the “avenue” form could well be a factor in the wider public not perceiving streetscapes as landscapes in their own right – which leads to the interesting question: when does a streetscape become a landscape of value?
