Quote:
Originally Posted by emathias
It's not so much about being "urban," but about being pedestrian-friendly. Too many plazas, too many "grand entrances," too many parking lots can make it difficult for pedestrians to do their business. Those things more properly belong in civic and cultural centers, which is why you see them most often for places like city hall or museums, where the place holds a role in society that benefits from some additional grand emphasis.
|
That entire area is incredibly prosaic; no, it's actually unpleasant. I'm not talking about the sketchy characters hanging around Cabrini-Green, either.
All of the redevelopment efforts for land in that area has given us the exact opposite of the tower-in-a-park, and the exact opposite is nearly as bad.
The modernist tower-in-a-park set aside the entire ground plane for public use; even the buildings usually had breezeways or common spaces on the ground floor. This produced a situation where all of the open space became uncared-for, because the city couldn't afford to keep it nice. Once the city stopped caring for it, there was no penalty for trashing it even further, because it didn't really belong to anybody and nobody would get upset.
The response to this gave us neighborhoods that sorta resemble a traditional Chicago neighborhood, but now the very idea of shared open space has been restricted to streets and a small handful of defined park spaces. Front yards, which traditionally softened the edge of the street, are now
all fenced in with iron fences - every last one - making the street into a very uninviting place, like a cell block in a prison. The fences discourage loitering on the street and prevent the front yards from getting trashed, but they also kill any kind of spontaneous street life. There's no chance of striking up a chat with your neighbor, for example.
Chances are that the continuing redevelopment efforts at Cabrini will follow the pattern of the existing redevelopments, which means fairly low to moderate density and dead street life. With such low density, it won't take long at all before the area is filled up with boring jumbo-brick houses and 2-flats set behind 8-foot-high wrought-iron.
The best city neighborhoods strike a balance between the two extremes. There are multiple ways to do it, but one good way is to build buildings to the sidewalk and lot line as much as possible, but still provide small respite spaces - pocket parks and plazas - every few blocks on every street. Under this scenario, I don't see why some of these plazas can't be provided by a major retailer. If the retailer is going to occupy several acres' worth of valuable city land (more than an entire city block), then they can and should dedicate some of their land as well-designed open space that works in concert with the street and with the store.
Another way would be to allow the streets themselves to provide the needed respite (think the Parisian system of green boulevards and narrow sidestreets) but the ship already sailed on that one when the city decided to turn Division into a mile-wide asphalt river.
Prev
Linear Mode
