Suggestions from Price Tags readers …
Scot Bathgate in New Zealand recommends this article “out of a cabinet minister in Australia quite outspoken on the failure of a number of high profile new urban projects around Sydney.”
In an extraordinary admission for a minister, David Borger warned a forum on transforming Sydney’s roads that the city needed to be careful not to repeat some of its worst urban planning mistakes.
”Woolloomooloo, Barangaroo potentially … Darling Harbour,
Sydney Olympic Park, Honeysuckle in Newcastle, the Church Street mall [in Parramatta], High Street in Penrith – in my view all of them are urban failures because they don’t have natural movement corridors,” he said.
”They can’t support high-end retail and they feel dead and lifeless and we are always trying to put things into them to make them work.
”But ultimately they haven’t worked well because they haven’t had the wonderful street systems that are part of old successful places. We need to be careful when we do decide to make changes to the urban street network that we don’t have unintended consequences.”
However, in Memphis, AL, Scot sends along news of a different approach to intervention from Memphis:
Forget the expensive planning consultants, and their thick studies. Skip the public meetings and endless debate. Ignore the sometimes stifling, car-centric regulations.
On Nov. 19-20, the businesses of Broad Avenue will stop just short of civil disobedience to make their dream street a reality.
They’re calling it “A New Face for an Old Broad.”
… the city has given permission for organizers to paint bike lanes on both sides of Broad, reduce the 60-foot-wide street to two lanes of traffic, and reconfigure the parking spaces.Large planters will create landscaping for bump-out islands on the street to help slow traffic.
Broad Avenue is latching on to the Better Block Project that started in an inner-city neighborhood of Dallas in April and is spreading around the country.
Don Buchanan of Vancouver thinks this report is worth checking out. “They’ve done some unique cross tabs of census data and added survey findings on why people are choosing to live in rented/condominium apartments.”
Conclusion:
Demand to rent apartments has therefore outpaced supply. This has resulted in escalating market
rental rates in many cities, today reaching a level that many residents with typical incomes cannot afford. There is pent-up demand for quality rental options in existing and emerging amenity-rich locations as evidenced by high rental rates and strong demand to rent condominium units (as well as purchase them). Providing new, luxury rental options to those who can afford it would also result in more options in existing buildings for those of more modest incomes.
From the University of B.C.’s Active Transportation Collaboratory:
The UBC Active Transportation Collaboratory is pleased to announce the release of a new report entitled Neighbourhood Design, Travel, and Health in Metro Vancouver: Using a Walkability Index.
This report introduces the Metro Vancouver Walkability Index tool
developed at UBC to measure detailed neighbourhood urban form characteristics across the region, and summarizes results from local studies that have applied the index to explore associations between neighbourhood design and travel behaviour, obesity, physical activity, and air pollution exposure. …
An executive summary of the report can be downloaded on our website.
re: the sydney example – i just got back from portland, and that was something that i noticed that made that city so special! no hideous, top-down, “master-planned” urban renewal projects!
forget the whole transport aspect of roads – even forget bikes for a second…that wonderful walkability created by those short, human-scale city blocks makes portland such a magical, sublime, psychologically-accessible place.
On Vancouver’s walkability I note from a post on Re: Place that the trollies have returned to Granville Street. Alas, Vancouver fails to grasp the opportunity the Olympics provided to have a genuine pedestrian precinct at its heart, a true stopping street using Jan Gehl’s parlance, where human beings on foot have the run of the entire space, and traffic, even the noble trolley bus, gives way. The aesthetic improvements notwithstanding (although those parking spaces on the south end up on the sidewalk and penned in by those garish bollards are truly awful)Granville Street is functionally unchanged from what it was before.
I am glad to read Australian Minister David Borger view that “[…] all of them are urban failures because they don’t have natural movement corridors,”
since it is exactly my view, which I have also expressed as a critics of the last year Surrey Townshift entries, http://voony.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/newton-new-town/ :
“road and transit, are the blood of the city, when architects/designer see them more often than not as a constraint not much different than a sewage system: so if there is no blood, there is no life, and it is what happen to most of the “master planned communities“”
Saying that, I have obviously a problem with the Mkushnir’s statement: “forget the whole transport aspect of roads”.
having clicked on his name, he seems to do “urban studies and planning” at UBC.
I am not necessarily overly surprised because, as I have said, only a Professional or student of the topic can come to explain to you that you should “forget the whole transport aspect of roads”,… and that is the problem…
So, you can’t, and David Borger is right: Thought nothing is human scale there, pedestrian timesquare is still a resounding success, and why? because keeping traffic (any traffic) moving was the raison d’etre of it.
Now, what people should eventually learn of Time square, is that a successful place is effectively a place where we can forget about its functionality (transportation, moving traffic) when we experience it. but to achieve this is not done by having the designer forgetting the primary functionality.
…otherwise, it could be like a restaurant chief preparing a meal forgetting that people come not only to enjoy the party but to eat too 😉