High Street Diversity

Author: Laura Vaughan
Year: 2013 (Chapter 7 of Suburban Urbanities: Suburbs and the Life of the High Street, ed. Vaughan; UCL Press)
Source type: chapter
Raw file: raw/chapters/vaughan-2013-high-street-diversity.md

Summary

This space-syntax–based chapter investigates the diversity of land uses in four London suburban town centres (High Barnet, Loughton, South Norwood, Surbiton) across ~130 years (1880–2013). Vaughan argues that the diversity of the high street — the "butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker" — is not a random mixing but a spatially structured, historically persistent pattern. Using space-syntax measures of integration and choice, she shows that successful centres (High Barnet, Surbiton) sustain diversity because their street networks support overlapping scales of movement (both local and wide-reaching), a balance that makes them resilient and adaptable over time.

Key Claims

• Diversity vs. "mixed-use": "Evidently diversity is not the same as 'mixed-use'" — it is a spatially organized property, taking different forms (block face, street side, around corners, within a distance) with different social and economic consequences.
• Jacobs's legacy: Jane Jacobs's four conditions for city diversity (mixed primary uses, short blocks, varied building types/ages, dense concentration) are "a powerful argument against mono-functional districts"; her description of the "daily ballet" shows public life as "the prosaic, small-scale activities that collectively make a trip into the local centre worthwhile."
• High streets as "hedgerows": like older hedgerows, older, denser town centres are more diverse and more continuous: "diverse areas are not formed randomly, but are the outcome of highly structured sets of related systems."
• Structural resilience: the continuity of the street network (the "movement interface" between through- and to-movement) persists despite massive spatial change, and this structural continuity is a "definition of structural resilience."
• Building adaptability: shorter frontage lengths, smaller building footprints and plots, and higher plot efficiency predict use change; street accessibility and "the flexibility of the street's area to adapt to changing scales of movement" are the overarching predictors of adaptability.
• Diversity as co-presence: "the greater the diversity of land uses, the more likely it is to generate different sorts of activity by different sorts of people." The everyday high street is "a mundane but vital aspect of what makes high streets places that continue to be valued."

Connections

Concepts: Everyday Architecture · Consumerism · Everyday Life
Authors: Laura Vaughan · Jane Jacobs
Related source notes: (empirical urban-morphology companion to the everyday/vernacular literature)

Direct Quotes

"Evidently diversity is not the same as 'mixed-use'."

"Seeing architecture as an object – where the mixing of different people carrying out different activities makes for the rich experience of encounter and daily routine – is shown to be a mundane but vital aspect of what makes high streets places that continue to be valued."

"Diverse areas are not formed randomly, but are the outcome of highly structured sets of related systems."

Open Questions

• Does morphological diversity ("co-presence") align with or complicate Geoffrey's more critical accounts of the high street — e.g., Sudjic's Starbucks analogy, or the consumerist critique of "clone towns"? Vaughan offers an empirical counter-narrative to high-street decline.