Abstract
Based on a corpus of specific regulations, this paper seeks to investigate the processes by which modern roads are conceived and realized. Such critical reading can not only contribute to identify some of the main spatial characteristics of contemporary urban settlements, but it also enables to understand better how small-scale elements, such as infrastructural devices, impact upon environment, landscape and urban fabric on a large scale. It helps to reveal how this particular regulatory regime (in)directly conveys a more or less vertical/horizontal, integrated/fragmented conception of territories. In particular, revealing the legal base of the wide spatial/territorial footprint of the road allows one to reflect upon a large amount of open spaces that can be re-considered both as surfaces for accessibility and sociability and as functional soils, that is to say as part of a living, three-dimensional integrated urban ecosystem.
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Notes
- 1.
Recent studies, combining a reticular approach of infrastructure and an area-based approach of urbanized territories, have revealed that the road network and its interfaces are particularly representative of the new kind of physical and functional relations between the components of the non-dense urbanised territory (Viganò et al. 2016; Belanger 2006; Mangin 2004; Graham and Marvin 2001; Pope 1996).
- 2.
In France, the Centre d’études et d’expertise sur les risques, l’environnement, la mobilité et l’aménagement is in charge of the synthesis and update of this corpus: the Documentation des Techniques Routières Françaises—DTRF.
- 3.
The whole ‘ecosystem’ of roads is considered here, including not only the modern typology of roads and urban apparatuses related to intensive use of motor vehicle—from highway to service road, and roundabouts, traffic islands, dedicated lanes, etc.—but also the open outdoor spaces surrounding them—from vegetated road shoulders and earth mounds, to mineral roadsides, parking areas, etc.
- 4.
In comparison, building regulations not only address safety issues, but also a wide range of other important objectives, such as aesthetic, energetic and environmental concerns, landscape and urban fabric integration, etc.
- 5.
The roadbed characteristics—i.e. number of lanes, with or without central reserve—are determined before the design project, when choosing road type.
- 6.
The texture of the recovery zone must be clearly distinguishable for the one of the carriageway—i.e. the asphalted path where automobiles normally drive—but stabilized enough and with no level difference to allow safe emergency use.
- 7.
For example, road profile adaptation to site topography is only envisaged as regard to critical contexts—such as mountainous areas—and concerns only visibility issues and readability of the road trajectory. In ARP, other issues regarding landscape visual integration or environmental impact are mentioned as basic principles, but they do not induce any concrete goal of the regulation. No mention is made of energy topics. More specifically, the road impact on soils’ superficial quality is only taken into account as regard to driving safety, durability of the roadbed or discharging of rainwater.
- 8.
The legibility principle concerns both the visual aspect of the road itself and the haptic characteristics of its texture, but it only considers the relation to the surrounding environment in terms of contrast, in order to avoid any ambiguity regarding the road perimeter and trajectory.
- 9.
ARP only mention that pedestrians and bicycles can circulate on the hard shoulder and vegetated verge, that is to say in the automobile recovery zone! Similarly, the presence of animals is only referred to in terms of potential collision with vehicles and vegetation growth is strictly limited in the security zone: trees must be isolated or cut-down.
- 10.
Regulations aim at preventing direct access from isolated private properties to inter-urban road, sometimes generating an additional separated lane for local access. Planar intersections with perpendicular minor roads are also prohibited in the case of high-speed roads, to the benefits of minor road derivation or roads overlap, with or without vertical interchange. Similarly, some high-speed inter-urban road categories induce bypass road strategies in order to avoid confrontation in urban areas.
- 11.
Based on William H. Whyte (The last landscape, 1968), Easterling envisaged that, combined with other infrastructural margins, the lateral portion of the Untied-Stats Interstate Highway could form national or transnational wide linear and transversal systems, able to support productive (agricultural), leisure or even commercial, residential and civic uses, as well as ecosystem services (Easterling 1999).
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Vialle, A. (2018). Building Horizontality? The Impact of Road Design Regulations on Urban Ecosystems. In: Viganò, P., Cavalieri, C., Barcelloni Corte, M. (eds) The Horizontal Metropolis Between Urbanism and Urbanization. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75975-3_35
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