hans monderman

When you don’t exactly know who has right of way, you tend to seek eye contact with other road users. 

first intro’d to Hans.. when i met Jerry face to face.. and he gave me one of his amazing business cards. each one had a different picture of a person on the back.. that had made an impression on Jerry (and i’m sure that he met). all i remembered for a year or so.. was that i got the guy that encouraged people to look each other in the eye.. when in the city.. on the street.

and now.. after reading walkable cities, by Jeff, the term – naked streets – has highly resonated – with city structure/ambiance.. but esp with embracing uncertainty ness.. and come to find out.. that term trails back to Hans.

Naked streets refers to the concept of stripping a roadway of its signage—all of it, including stop signs, signals, and even stripes. Far from creating mayhem, this approach appears to have lowered crash rates wherever it has been tried.          p. 175 walkable cities – Jeff

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Hans Monderman (19 November 1945 – 7 January 2008) was a Dutch road traffic engineer and innovator. He was recognized for radically challenging the criteria used to evaluate engineering solutions for street design. His work compelled transportation planners and highway engineers to look afresh at the way people and technology relate to each other.

His most famous design approach is the concept of “shared space“, an urban design approach that seeks to minimise demarcations between vehicle traffic and pedestrians, often by removing features such as kerbs, road surface markings, traffic signs, and regulations. Monderman found that the traffic efficiency and safety improved when the street and surrounding public space was redesigned to encourage each person to negotiate their movement directly with others.

One of the better known of Monderman’s accomplishments is the Dutch Woonerf, or “Living Street” project, which originated from a basically unplanned citizen initiative in Delft in 1968.