As designers we can spend most of our time considering buildings. Be it a house, a stadium, a mosque or office block the vertical structure dominates design discussions ahead of what we might call the horizontal infrastructure, the streets, between them. In some urban areas this is fine as skilled landscape designers step in to create an oasis in the city. However, outside of the inner city large new housing developments are still too often led by a distributor road orthodoxy.

This is astonishing really, since the power of public space and street design has long been intellectually accepted. We know empirically that people will pay more for walkable places with traditional street patterns. We know with hard data that large distributor roads sever communities leading to social isolation. And we know that large road infrastructure damages the mental and physical health of those nearby through noise and air pollution.

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