Do I live on a woonerf?

This London cul-de-sac is a perfect living yard: woonerf.

After yesterday's post and the comments, I decided to rewrite and re-post the following which looked at suburban street design in London, Ontario, in particular and North American suburbia in general.

It was almost a decade ago that one of the coolest words in urban planning circles was woonerf. According to the local London paper, a woonerf was Dutch for naked street. I preferred an alternate translation: living street.

Woonerfs were streets designed, or redesigned, to force drivers to slow down as they shared the road with cyclists, pedestrians and children. There was no clear division between traffic and pedestrian rights of way in properly designed woonerfs.

Reading this gave me a crazy thought. Maybe I was living on a woonerf. Have North American suburbanites been enjoying their own form of woonerfs for years: Courts, crescents, places and culs-de-sac?

Traffic and kids share my suburban court.

Search the web today and you'll find examples of Dutch woonerfs with gardens and pedestrian seating nestled in among the shrubs and flowers.

These remind me of the court directly above mine and linked to my court by a well-used walkway. (I featured it earlier in the month.)

The first woonerf was in the City of Delft, Netherlands, back in the '60s. In the following decade, the Dutch government set design standards and passed traffic laws regulating woonerfs.

I feel some suburban courts come quite close to meeting the Dutch goals.