Alicia, Courtyard Urbanist@UrbanCourtyard
How to reverse 20c road widening?
On existing streets, large-scale ROW (right of way) reduction is possible but politically and operationally TUFF (to be clear, I think ROW reduction is the longterm goal and worth the effort of pursuing). But you’re dealing with utilities, fire access standards, drainage, and entrenched expectations about parking and lane widths. In most U.S. contexts, a full curb-to-curb narrowing to Asian/european proportions is CHALLENGING in the near term.
What is realistic—and already happening—is effective narrowing:
•wider sidewalks and tree zones
•curb extensions
•parking lanes + slow travel lanes (10–11’)
•occasional shared streets or woonerf treatments
That gets you much closer spatially without touching the legal ROW.
Makes roads safer and more pleasant but doesn’t solve larger problem: too much of urban land area is for transit and not enough for buildings and usable green space.
But the more important point: you don’t actually need to narrow the ROW to make courtyard urbanism work. The typology’s performance comes from the block interior and parcel structure, not just façade-to-façade distance. Chicago is the proof—wide streets, but still capable of excellent courtyard buildings when the parcels and massing are right.
Where you do get true proportion shifts is in:
•new streets on large sites (campuses, mall redevelopments, industrial land)
•replatting / subdivision where you can reset parcel geometry and introduce narrower local streets or paseos
So pragmatically:
•retrofit existing streets through traffic calming and spatial tightening
•deploy ideal geometry in new or re-platted districts
Courtyard urbanism doesn’t hinge on perfect street widths but rather on restoring fine-grained parcels and shared interior space.
Here’s Berlin road narrowing projects that restore the courtyard block fabric that had been destroyed when road was widened
