Southville Home Zone: An Independent Evaluation

Abstract

In September 2001 Bristol City Council (BCC) began the four-and-a-half year process of implementing the Southville Home Zone (HZ) focussed around a bid to the national Home Zone Challenge fund made available by the UK Government Department for Transport (DfT). The overarching aim of a HZ is to rebalance the priorities in residential streets away from motor traffic, in favour of ‘streets as living spaces’; enabling social activity such as play, and non-motorised movement. BCC has been a pioneering local authority in the introduction of HZs in the UK. In November 2005, the University of the West of England, Bristol (UWE) was commissioned to conduct an independent evaluation of the implementation process of the Southville HZ project and its outcomes. It is concluded that Southville was relatively unusual as a retrofit HZ project in that the area was not in need of urban regeneration on grounds of social policy objectives. Nonetheless the Southville scheme is recognised as having brought identifiable environmental, social and behavioural benefits by the majority, but arriving at those outcomes is seen as a complex, difficult and expensive process. It is observed that many of the difficulties experienced and high costs in the case of Southville (existing community with a range of expectations leading to complex consultation; existing, aged street infrastructure; constrained carriageway width) relate to the fact the project was a retrofit HZ.

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