Boris Johnson's Narrow Escape

Ideas on how to defuse the street environment of visual signals that mark it out as exclusively for passing motor traffic have been around for a long time--Google 'naked streets' (no sniggering at the back) or for the late Hans Monderman for fairly recent developments.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,448747,00.html
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,505246,00.html

I remember someone argueing that this was an 'experiment' disregarding the safety of pedestrians ...