Buchanan & Monderman

Compare and contrast the approaches of Buchanan and Monderman to ordering public spaces that include pedestrians and motor vehicles.
This essay explores the 2 case studies of the approaches, comparisons and differences of Buchanan and Monderman’s ordering of public space, including pedestrians and motor vehicles, their views of traffic governance, also the effects these approaches have on society. There are many various factors in understanding how social order of public spaces is made and remade with the ever changing intricacy of society and the people and things that make up what social sharing of spaces comprises of.
. The case studies consist of the Buchanan Report and Monderman’s thesis which both look at the connection between shared public space and the relationship between people and motor vehicles and how these generate order.
The first case study is the widely influential Buchanan report from the 1960’s. This report, commissioned by the UK government, focused on the need of humans to live with motor vehicles (Silva, 2009,).The key theory of the report was to create a system that would segregate ‘rooms’ which were used for shopping, leisure and working from corridors for where the traffic would go to, these isolated areas were referred to as ‘environmental units’. Due to the increase in car ownership at the time, Buchanan suggested that for civility to be created either the use of cars would have to be greatly reduced or the towns would have to be reconstructed to hold more vehicles. Owing to the costs involved in implementing the second choice, the restriction of car use became the chosen vision for ordering space (Silva, 2009, p.328). Buchanan’s approach to social order is a Modernist one, which emphasizes uniformity and standardizations, with its core values of social order being mobility and car ownership, as it was viewed as a symbol of material success. He viewed the role of authority as one of setting and implementing rules that made sure of…