| Revitalization Strategies | Streetscape Improvements |
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... most approaches to downtown revitalization include improvements to the pedestrian environment in an effort to approximate the environment of the shopping center.Others agree that pedestrian malls have been less than successful....The United States is filled with beautifully designed pedestrian malls and streetscapes lined by empty buildings. "Attractive" pedestrian environments do not actually attract anyone. Conversely, many urban places which have not been provided with pedestrian "amenities" are crowded with people and thriving businesses. Grey, in his study of People and Downtown, concluded that:
"Malls and public spaces ...depend for their value upon their relationship to peoples' activity patterns. It must be understood why people are there and how they use the immediate environment."3
One of the biggest fads in the 70s and early 80s was the malling of downtown America. Cities all over the United States closed off streets to traffic and parking, planted trees, built fountains, installed benches, all to create pedestrian-friendly retail areas.This need for understanding the significance of functional characteristics over physical characteristics is shown clearly in a newspaper article describing the reasons a downtown pedestrian mall, which had been built in the early 1970s and banned traffic from a primary downtown street, was being removed and being replaced, at no little expense, once again with a street with traffic.Many towns are ripping out those malls.
...no one realized how important auto traffic would be to the health of downtown retailers.
We've got traffic sailing by our cities instead of stopping in them...
Ann Arbor tried it differently. The city permits two-way traffic on its downtown Main Street. But parking is limited; sidewalks are extra-wide for outdoor cafes; and the city closes the street several days each summer for art fairs and other special events. The result is a bustling atmosphere all day and evening.4
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Oak Park, Illinois Replacing the Downtown Mall With Traffic
In the early 1970s, officials in this Chicago suburb closed their two main shopping streets to traffic, planted trees and grass and flowers where there had been concrete, and turned the whole area into a landscaped pedestrian mall, The hope was to revitalize a facing downtown, and lure back shoppers and retailers from these other malls, the large regional shopping centers that had stolen them away.
But while Oak Park's mall may be a fine place for a stroll, it has not done much for local merchants or their customers over the last 13 years. With nearly 20 percent of the storefronts along the mall vacant and sales revenues among merchats continuing to plummet, the village is now considering spending $2 million to pull out most of the plantings and reopen at least one of the streets to automobile traffic.
...the decision there underscored a basic assumption: The main downtown shopping strip ought to look and function more like a street than a park. "In the 1960s and 1970s, people were more interested in the design of downtowns, rather than their use." Indeed, many city pedestrian malls were the creations of architects and landscape planners, rather than retailers. Grass berms and landscaping were pleasant to the eye, but often interfered with movement of shoppers between store. "Retailers went along because they were grasping at straws."
Redesign can present town and city officials with difficult political decisions. Although a planning committee has urged that part of the Oak Park Mall be reopened to traffic, many residents are flatly opposed, arguing that the mall should be preserved as a kind of green island in the city.
Planners and retailers, who are determined to restore a sense of the street to Main Street, say that is precisely the problem. "What this is really all about is back to basics," said Peter Mosbacher, an official with Project for Public Spaces. "The bottom line is: Downtown means urban, and urban implies traffic and noise and people and motion."5
A 1992 news article further supports the notion that revitalization may not best be brought about through physical improvements, but rather through efforts to retain retail businesses and attract selected new ones.
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Remodeling doesn't always revitalize downtown areas
Michigan cities, small and large, have spent millions of dollars on pedestrian malls, brick "streetscapes," and other projects aimed at restoring downtown shopping districts.
However, urban planning experts--including some consultants paid to recommend the projects--admit there's never beena careful study to determine whether such public improvements do any good.
"I think they were overblown in terms of their potential to add any actual retail sales," said Roger Hamlin, coordinator of Michigan State University's Urban Planning Program. The city of Battle Creek spent more than a million dollars in the mid-70s to turn a downtown street into a pedestrian mall. This summer--on the advice of the same consulting firm that designed the mall--the city will spend $800,000 to restore the street. Studies showed that buildings on nearby streets commanded higher rents than those on the mall itself.
"Removal of the mall received almost unanimous approval from merchants.' said Battle Creek planning director Mike Buckley. '...It was attractive, landscaped space, but it didn't work for the retailers."
Meanwhile, scores of smaller cities have invested in downtown streetscape improvements.
Most downtowns face similar problems: vacant stores; a feeling that there isn't enough parking; and competition from strip malls and ddiscount stores at the edge of town.
MSU's Hamlin said downtown revitalization should mean different things in different cities.
Often, he said, transportation patterns and population growth have shifted the center of a community away form downtown. When that happens, he suggested, cities might better llok for new uses for many downtown commercial buileings.
"The real hope for most old downtowns is to not try to be the center of the world but to try to be special in some way," he said.6
1 Jennifer Steinhauer. 1996. "When Shoppers Walk Away From Pedestrian Malls." New York Times (5 November). p. C4.
2 Carol Sullivan. "Form and Function in Downtown Revitalization." Doctor of Architecture dissertation. The University of Michigan.
3 Grey. People and Downtown. 1970. p. xix.
4 John Gallagher. "Taking back the streets." Detroit Free Press. September 23, 1991. p. 6F.
5 Reference unknown.
6 Article by Edward Hoogterp in Ann Arbor News. 4 June 1992.
| Revitalization Strategies | Streetscape Improvements |
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| Waterfront Revitalization | Skywalks |
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| Underground malls | Pedestrians and Downtowns |
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