designing for place and people

There are 19,000 cars on the Main Road between Muizenberg and Kalk Bay each day.  I estimate that 1,000 of these are travelling to or from Kalk Bay.*  Most of the rest - some 18,000 cars - pass through Kalk Bay on their way to  somewhere else. Many small towns on the N1 used to be like this. The highway divided the village until bypasses were built and residents regained the use of Main Road, the heart of any village.    In A New Theory of Urban Design architect/planner Christopher Alexander calls for town planning to be turned on its head. Instead of placing the needs of the car first, we should design for place and people.  Once we have done that we connect these places up as best we can. Thats how places with character  - the places we love to visit - evolved.  It's that quality - the narrow cobbled stoned roads which one has to negotiate with care -  that makes Kalk Bay such a sought after place to live.

*Using a method suggested to me by the road engineers, I counted the number of parking places in Kalk Bay and added 20% to arrive at the number of cars in Kalk Bay,  and then doubled it to allow for a return journey.