The senses are essentially frontally oriented, and one of the best developed and most useful senses, the sense of sight, is distinctly horizontal. The horizontal visual field is considerably wider than the vertical. If one looks straight ahead, it is possible to glimpse what is going on to both sides within a horizontal circle of almost ninety

In Italian cities with pedestrian streets and automobile-free squares, the outdoor city life is often much more pronounced than in the car-oriented neighboring cities, even though the climate is the same. A 1978 survey of street activities in both trafficked and pedestrian streets in Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, Australia, carried out by

In situations where the degree of crowding can be determined freely, the upper limit for an acceptable density in streets and on sidewalks with two-way pedestrian traffic appears to be around 10 to 15 pedestrians per minute per meter (3 ft.) street width. This corresponds to a pedestrian flow of some one hundred people per minute in a 10-meter-wide

When buildings are narrow, the street length is shortened, the walking distances are reduced, and street life is enhanced. (Competition project for the extension of Rørås, Norway.) Narrow street frontages mean short distances between entrances – and entrances are where the majority of events nearly always take place.

In connection with the effort to give the positive processes a chance, it is important to note that life between buildings, the people and events that can be observed in a given space, is a product of number and duration of the individual events. It is not the number of people or events, but rather the number of minutes spent outdoors that is

The Danish cooperative housing project Tinggården [49], consisting of eighty rental housing units built in 1978, is an example of a building complex in which planners carefully considered both social and physical structure. The goal was to get processes and project to work together. Planning was a joint venture of the future residents and the

Different kinds of social activities occur in many places: in dwellings; in private outdoor spaces, gardens, and balconies; in public buildings; at places of work; and so on; but in this context only those activities that occur in publicly accessible spaces are examined. These activities could also be termed “resultant” activities, because in

When the quality of outdoor areas is good, optional activities occur with increasing frequency. Furthermore, as levels of optional activity rise, the number of social activities usually increases substantially.

Street life is drastically reduced when small, active units are superseded by large units. In many places it is possible to see how life in the streets has dwindled drastically as gas stations, car dealerships, and parking lots have created holes and voids in the city fabric, or when passive units such as offices and banks move in. In contrast,