The Mall will undergo some significant changes with the
ongoing construction of the new South Pointe mega-mall. At the very least, it will be
loosing most of its large anchor stores. If the Mall itself were to go into rapid economic
decline, it would leave a gaping hole in the middle of the community. Other cities have
faced this problem, and there are significant number of cases where similar situations
have given communities the opportunity to renew themselves with amazing increases in
attractiveness, vitality, and liveability. We have that opportunity before us now, and to
make South Square a more attractive, vital, and liveable community, we will need to
address these issues:
- South Square has to strengthen its identity. This can happen
if it develops a center and a full complement of uses that make up a community. These uses
include all the elements which make up a typical urban district: public spaces (streets,
sidewalks, bikeways, parks, and squares), public buildings (such as schools), a variety of
residences, offices, and retail stores, and distinct edges.
- Everyone in the South Square area should be looking for
every opportunity to increase the diversity of uses: this is a matter both of many
different types of activities going on as well as activities at all hours of the day. This
issue is both an economic issue and a security issue. People like to go where the public
streets and sidewalks are filled with activity; they like to spend money at restaurants
and stores in the area. People on the streets twenty-four hours a day create a mutual
security.
- An urban community such as South Square is part of a larger
urban entity. It needs to be appropriately connected to the larger area. We need to have
good roads, good access to present and future mass transit systems. On the other hand, we
do not want South Square to be known as a big parking lot or a big road with fast-moving
traffic. In fact, some of the most important transportation systems which make a community
liveable are its sidewalks and bikeways; in other words, a pedestrian system which
connects residences, schools, shopping areas, office areas, libraries, and parks. In fact,
the system will become outstanding when it connects South Square to a regional trail
system.
The climate for reinventing the mall and finding a
community is very good. All the way up to the national level, people are discussing how to
make good cities. One group refers to itself as New Urbanists; these theorist and
designers are actually looking to older models for what a good village or town or city is.
There is another group which advocates Smart Growth; it’s goals are economic
viability for a community, or in other words, sustainability. It is notable in that the
criteria for sustainability include smart stewardship of our environment and our spirits.
Smart Growth and New Urbanism both seek healthy communities, and given that the two camps
begin at different points along the spectrum, their visions for healthy communities have a
remarkable similarity.
In fact, there is a large body of information about the
forms and patterns that constitute good urban design. When we embark upon our reinvention
of the South Square Mall and its surroundings, we should keep these principles before us:
Economics
- We should end up with a wide variety of economic uses, and
at any give point in the redevelopment, we should be asking what economic uses are
lacking.
- We should strive to maintain a large stock of older
buildings; rents are more affordable and make it possible for start-up companies and
interesting businesses to survive. At the same time, return to the first
principle—namely that there should be a wide variety of economic uses, and this
includes uses which cannot afford to pay for Class A office or retail space.
- Improvements should occur in many small increments as
opposed to a few very large increments.
- No existing resources should be squandered.
The Form of the Place (Organization,
Streets, Architecture, Landscape)
- Size is a first determinate for organizing the area: we
should look at the South Square area as a collection of identifiable areas, each with a
center and with edges that can be reached by a five-minute walk from the center. This is
approximately a quarter-mile walk. Andres Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk , noted New
Urbanist, www.dpz.com , [Opens in new
window] have put forth this idea; they call this unit a neighborhood. More details of this
model include:
- The center is always a public space and the location of
public buildings such as a school, day-care centers, churches, or a meeting hall.
- Retail is sometimes located in the center.
- Corridors form the edges; these can be transportation
corridors such as roads or rail lines. The corridor can also be a greenway. In an urban
setting, where there are a collection of neighborhoods, the corridor/edges are frequently
major streets with retail. This doubles the population who would routinely shop at these
retail locations and allows people from outside the neighborhood easy access to the
retail.
- Streets should be a fine-grained network of interconnected
paths. This makes it easier to get around the neighborhood and does not concentrate
traffic on inappropriate roads.
- Streets and sidewalks plus public squares and parks are the
public realm. In an era when people have aggrandized their private realms, our public
space has suffered much neglect and diminution. We need to make beautiful streets and
sidewalks as a first priority. We also need to make useable public squares and parks which
are safe and beautiful by their very design.
- Sidewalks may be the most important part of the public realm
in a city. This is truly the place where people are pre-eminent. We should encourage
sidewalk cafes and restaurants; merchants should have room to display goods outside.
Sidewalks should be large enough for children to ride a tricycle or skate or play
hop-scotch.
- The public realm should be beautifully designed, from the
pavement beneath our feet (or tires) to benches and light fixtures. Above all, we should
re-establish the tradition of placing significant art in public places; this includes
statuary, murals, and fountains.
- One of the most important aspects of streets and sidewalks
are their outer edges. Building should form a firm line; they should not be pulled back to
allow off-street parking in front of them (this parking belongs along the street and in
the interior of the blocks). The buildings which form the street edge should allow you to
see in, to glimpse what is going on inside. This creates liveliness, friendliness, and
security on the sidewalk. It is important that this zone be semi-public and semi-private.
As an example, second story balconies should be allow to project over sidewalks.
- Landscaping and green space are also part of the public
realm. Depending on their character and the activities along them, some streets should
have street trees. Plantings in parks and public squares should be maintainable, and must
be maintained. Each neighborhood should be connected with a regional trail and greenway
system. Somewhere there should be the potential to reach out into the country, what used
to be called the hinterland
Experience of the Place
- What is the genius loci of South Square? Genius loci is
Latin for "spirit of the place", or more accurately, the native spirit of the
place. Suppose someone from Kansas was blindfolded, brought here by some magic carpet, and
taken to the top floor of the University Tower where the blindfold was removed. Looking
down on the South Square area, this Kansan could be looking at anyplace USA. "Oh, we
have a Boston Market and, yes, they sell Nissans in my hometown." If we let this
person look north, she would see the forest of North Caroline, and if she had any special
training in ecology, she might come close to knowing where she was. At the moment, there
is no native character to the South Square area, nothing which create a sense of
place—our place. This is a difficult moment; the South Square community has no
special character that makes it instantly recognizable—and having a recognizable
identity is important for community. It is neither appropriate to turn back the clock and
recreate an old South setting or to borrow some neo-traditional image. This design
workshop can only start a dialogue about finding the community’s unique character;
the effort will take decades.
- Aesthetics has too long been absent from the criteria by
which we judge new development. It is time to reassert the importance of beauty in the
public and private realms of our community. This is not to be confused with establishing
an acceptable style of building. Many different styles can contribute to the beauty of a
place. Instead, we must care about making a sidewalk, a building, a street, a window
display that is beautiful. In a perverse way, our lack of attention to the beauty of the
places we make seems like a mean legacy for our children.
- One cannot mention diversity without the risk of raising
anxieties. Diversity can mean that we confront things with which we are unfamiliar and at
our very animal core, the unknown raises an alarm about possible danger; however, when we
live in a community with a strong sense of its members, of its anchors, of it identity,
then diversity is not only welcome, but an attractive and useful feature.
We need to be clear about what diversity means (and it
doesn’t mean one thing):
- Diversity can describe the number of businesses and services
available to us in our community—the more diversity, the better.
- Diversity can mean different people, people who have
different professions, different incomes, different ideas, different languages and
cultures. A community which has a good sense of itself, an identity, can absorb these
differences without becoming defensive; a community which doesn’t have a sense of
cohesion is frightened. What is critical then is a balance of stability and fermentation;
people and community need renewal, and this comes from different ways of looking at
things.
- Diversity can mean many different activities at different
hours of the day. This diversity is good; it is the cornerstone of security and economic
well-being.
- Diversity also means that many different people sponsor
building projects or improvements.
But, what does this mean about the planning and design of a
place. In the first place, these ideas underpin the notion that any community needs to a
fine-grained intertwining of old and new buildings. The multitude of businesses that make
a lively vital community need a range of lease rates. A community also needs residences
for all incomes, residences which are not segregated by income level. It needs to have
streets and sidewalks that are the property of the community; the outdoor life of the
community must flow onto the sidewalk (and by study, we know what physical form these
sidewalks need.) If we are on our own sidewalks, our community can accommodate strangers.
Diversity also means that places should be designed to share facilities at different
hours; a common example of this is that parking for daytime businesses becomes parking for
evening entertainment venues. Finally, diversity means that many different people have
built the place, and their particular vision contributes to the uniqueness and the
attractiveness of a place.
- It seems that the malaise of modern places is that we can
afford to build them, but we cannot finance their maintenance.; hence, we build them, use
them, throw them away. You cannot love such places. We have to re-establish the dignity of
maintenance—not that we’ve entirely lost it: after all, you love your plumber
when your toilet is stopped up. But, if there’s trash on our sidewalks or graffiti on
our buildings, we will invest in a much broader sense of well-beingwhen we address these
problems. If we maintain our streets, our sidewalks, our public places, our buildings,
everyone will be inclined to respect our public realm.
- It was pointed out earlier in this section on the character
of the place that our Kansan might be able to guess where she was if she was trained in
the botanical sciences. This raise the issue of what the planted environment in a town
should be and how it contributes to the experience of the place.
- First, there should be a continuum of planting schemes that
range from the places we design and plant (public squares, parks and gardens, private
gardens) for enjoyment to places we plant for useful purposes (personal garden to farms)
to places we leave relatively undisturbed (managed wilderness such as one finds in public
parks) to places which are truly wild (of which there are very few in our area).
- Second, we should connect this continuum of places with
trails that lead us outward through farmland, parks, ideally ending in the true wild. This
notion has very broad implications because it requires local, regional and national
efforts.
Native plantings of a place give us many anchors to connect
us to our community: in Durham, one can be drawn home by the blooming of the daffodils and
dogwoods, a little later, the blooming of azaleas; and what is summer but the smell of
honeysuckle by day and magnolias at night; summer includes daylilies while fall starts
with the brilliant yellow of marsh sunflowers along the road and turns into the brilliant
reds of dogwood leaves and sourwood leaves with an accompaniment of yellows and oranges
from oaks and maples that can sometimes take one’s breathe away. To most of us city
dwellers, these phenomenon are not at the forefront of our thoughts; yet, go away to a
very different place for a year, and see how many of these images accompany you and greet
you when you return.
Security
This section seems to be redundant in focusing on issues
that have already been mentioned, but community security seem to be born out of man y of
the other ideals of community planning.
- One way to achieve security is the diversity I spoke of. If
there are a diversity of uses and a diversity of times at which these uses occur, then
there are people on the streets at many different times of the day.
- Part of the diverse times that people have eyes on the
community’s public spaces is related to having diverse levels of housing intermixed.
Housing mixes mean that students and elderly citizens live amongst families with two
working parents; the elderly are often at home during the day, and student—well, they
keep such weird hours that there is no telling what part of the day they might not be
coming and going. Many different members of the community can be eyes on the street.
- Security also requires good policing. Part of that policing
should be done by the community, but a definite part is provided by our police force. We
need to have a police station at the heart of our reinvented South Square, and like the
downtown, we need a lot of those police on the sidewalks and on their bicycles.
Transportation
Transportation is a difficult urban issue because for the
last fifty-five years, the personal car has been America’s ultimate form of
transportation.
- The car has had a negative influence on the way cities have
grown in the last fifty years; they have encourage lower densities, they have taken up a
lot of valuable space, they have allowed us to enjoy the fantasy of the country estate
(often on a quarter-acres of land); they have left us stranded a long way from a whole
community.
- Older American cities, and modern European cities and
regions depended and still depend upon buses, trams, trains to provide mobility; however,
a good many of the goods, amenities, and security that one needs are located within
walking distance. We are struggling to re-establish a civilized community—so the
political messages seem to be saying this year, and somehow we have to cause several
things to happen at once: a city of many available goods, services, and uses in a compact,
walkable area, and a mass transportation system that reaches beyond that immediate walking
radius.
- Thus, our transportation issues are: first, a
pedestrian-friendly system of sidewalks, streets, trails, and greenways scaled to people,
not cars; second, ways to accommodate cars without giving in to their inhuman scale);
third, local, regional, and national mass transportation systems that are convenient,
timely, civil, and even fun. There are many strategies for making the pedestrian system
predominant, and these strategies create places that we like walk.
- Transportation systems connect one place to another. At
present, we find that long stretches of streets become a pseudo-place, lined with one
building after another, each sitting isolated in the midst of lots of parking space. In
fact, these streets do not connect places; they become a blur of sameness, and there is no
pleasure in walking along or driving on them.
- Road and streets can help define places; they can be an
important axis that connects important locations, they can be edges, they can be places in
themselves such as Las Ramblas in Barcelona which is one of the world’s great
strolling places. A road can pass through a "gateway" at the edge of a district.
At South Square, Highway 15-501 By-Pass crosses over 15-501 Business creating a definite
gate through which one arrives in the South Square area.
- Streets have a hierarchy of functions and as such have
different sizes and configurations. Often, streets are simply too large. One can
capitalize on this by creating parallel parking or by adding a bike lane.
- Urban streets need edges; building should be built up to the
back of the sidewalk. The front of these buildings should line up with only minor
variance.
- In a town or city, streets that are arranged in a grid
pattern are easier to get around; people tend to get off their own block and onto others
more easily.
- Parking should not predominate; it should be behind
buildings, in the middle of blocks, or in parking garages. Parallel parking on streets in
an old and very successful pattern. With parallel parking, pedestrians feel more securely
separated from automobile traffic.
- Someone has pointed out that one of the really great ways to
give money back to a family is to create mass transportation systems that allow the family
to have one less automobile.
- A mass transportation system has to address a range of
options; a system of buses that serve a fine-grained distribution of destinations
frequently is very effective. It becomes more effective with denser concentrations of uses
What is harder to support is a bus system that moves between concentrations of
development. Urban sprawl is a great enemy of a good mass transportation system. In a
metropolitan region like ours, a rail system can serve the large population which now
commutes.
- One last point: we would make better communities if we
designed streets as beautiful rooms.
Environmental Issues
Cities can easily create hazardous conditions for nature.
In the first place, spreading development destroys natural lands and agricultural lands.
Urban environments produce a lot of pollutants but provide few environments that buffer
the natural world or absorb the pollutants. Many an urban waterway is highly polluted, an
especially aggravating condition since we are all attract to waterways. The amount of
surplus or waste that are produced in cities is gargantuan. Simply by their scale,
buildings can become a major waste problem when they have outlived their usefulness; this
is the largest recycling problem.
- The most important environmental concept is to concentrate
growth and to stop our using up natural land at the alarming pace of today.
- The second most important concept is to produce less toxic
pollutants.
- The third is to construct buildings to last much longer than
we now do. The ultimate recycling of the urban environment is adaptation and reuse; the
buildings we construct today seem to deteriorate so rapidly that there is little incentive
to reuse the building. We cannot love an urban environment built with so little care.
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