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Architectural difference between roads and streets.

7/15/2014
 Uhuru street in Dar es salaam

    Several terms such as, street, path, avenue, highway, way, route, have been used almost interchangeably. It would be possible to extend this list to include other words such as, road, boulevard, mall and promenade, which have similar meanings. Without going into too great a discussion of definitions, for the purpose of this article the main distinction to be made is between road and street. 
    Road is at once an act of riding between different places, used by travellers on foot or vehicles. Or it is any path, way or course to some end or journey. The emphasis is on movement between places, the principle lines of communication between places – a two-dimensional ribbon, running on the surface of the landscape, carried over it by bridge or beneath by tunnel.

 
 road in Dar es salaam
    A street may have these attributes, but its more common meaning is a road in a town or village, comparatively wide as opposed to a lane or alley. More importantly it is a road, that is the linear surface along which movement occurs between the adjacent houses – ‘it runs between two lines of houses or shops,’ says a dictionary definition.

 Uhuru street in Dar es salaam

   For the purpose of this analysis the street will be taken as an enclosed, three-dimensional space between two lines of adjacent buildings.

    One particular feature of the road or the thoroughfare which is incompatible with the street is the movement of fast-moving or heavy traffic with all its engineering requirements. It was probably the elevation of the functional needs of vehicular traffic to a design dogma by avant-garde members of the Modern Movements in architecture and city planning which contributed to the neglect of the street and its architecture.

 ocean road in Dar es salaam

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