I See Vibrant Urban Streets
Three years ago I did a post, Envisioning Smart Growth, that I want to make you aware of. Â In that post I featured some impressive photoshop work done by a California firm, Urban Advantage:
My original post has two intermediate steps between the before and after. The firm’s website has many more examples of using photoshop to create visuals to show how streets can be improved through narrowing streets, widening sidewalks, building up to the street and so on.
I often like to visit their site to see the latest projects they have done, helping their clients all over the country to visually show how proposed changes would help streets and places mature into a more urban/walkable form. Of the many posts I’ve done over the last five years this simple post was one of my favorites. I have thoughts of transformations like this going through my head for every corridor in the region.
My hope is we, as a city & region, will begin to think beyond what we have today and work toward what we can have tomorrow. This requires coming together to create a collaborative vision and implementing the zoning to ensure that future efforts build toward the vision. I invite you to look through the many examples on their site. The photoshop work is the easy part, I also know that streets won’t transform themselves without a strong vision.
– Steve Patterson
Two words: street trees. That’s what I see in the after picture. It makes a sort of psychological barrier that allows for sidewalk life. I know that isn’t everything, but without it? I don’t like to walk down streets without trees.
These are great! To add to Bridgett’s comment, I think that the human-scaled street lamps are an important component of the “after” picture. Obviously, the introduction of PEOPLE into the environment helps, but we need an inviting street to attract them. Some really simple changes can make a world of difference.
sort of a… ‘what’s there’, and ‘what should be’.
Your hope is my hope, Steve. I think we can achieve this “collaborative” vision in its purest form if we can show people that unless they help make planning decisions, then planning decisions are made for them. The same analogy holds for politics in general.
It is a difference between the internally driven and externally imposed plans; the democratic and the technocratic. We must start at the neighborhood level. Organizing neighborhood forums around issues of block, street, and community planning, is the first step. Forums could then decide to elect neighborhood councils or proceed with a direct democracy form. The step from forum to council could be a large one and it has the potential, as it has in the past, to become disconnected from the original vision of the community.
Unless we begin at the grassroots and value the decisions, desires, and needs of the local population, then the politics of planning will remain in the hands of estranged bureaucrats and technocrats. The time is now to take charge of our city, one street at a time. Everyone should look at their local landscapes and begin talking with neighbors about ways to improve, maintain, or redesign. If people would take half as much time to think about the design of their city and the metropolitan landscape as they think about their lawns and gardens, then we just might have a collaborative planning process unfold.
Another case of the law of unintended consequences – Grand has been idenitified as the preferred alternative for the Northside-Southside rail transit link (light rail or streetcar). While not strictly analagous, what happened in Boston raises some interesting questions, both here and further north: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/…