A Tale of Two Cities — and Two Convention Centers Jeff Speck recently attended a conference where the convention center was adjacent to a walkable portion of the destination’s downtown. But walking from the hotel to the convention center along a seven-lane road, which he did every morning, he said, “was an endless, horrible experience.”
The convention center itself was lovely, Speck said. “The hotel was absolutely surprised that we were not being driven, [that we were not] taking shuttles,” he said. “But it was a conference of urban designers, so we walked. Who wants to have to take a shuttle from their hotel to the convention center when they could be on a nice street?”
Compare that to a story Speck relates inWalkable City, about the Short North district in Colum- bus, Ohio. “It was a great ethnic neighborhood, with great food, great shopping,” Speck said, “but the convention center was just across a nasty overpass from the Short North.” To get there, convention attendees had to cross a “barren, windswept” bridge over an interstate highway with nothing but a chain-link “suicide screen.”
About 10 years ago, Columbus rebuilt the bridge as a 200-foot-wide span, with retail shops lining it like the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy. The “novel bridge performed an act of magic,” Speck writes. “It made the highway disappear.” Two walkable districts “have been unified into one, and an entire sector of the city has changed its character.”
visceral way — as a user. Since the publication ofWalkable City, his speaking schedule has gone into overdrive. “I go to a heck of a lot of these places, because often I am speaking in them,” he said. “And I am always amazed at how many cities are essentially leaving money on the table by the way that they fail to integrate these facilities into their community.”
Where do you place convention centers in the framework of walkable cities?
There is no greater collector and disgorger of pedestrians in a city than conventioneers. Unlike most citizens, at least in driving cities, conventioneers try to arrive without a vehicle and are so willing and so ready to be pedestrians in the city. And they arrive in such great numbers that they are a tremendous resource. But, as you well know, [convention centers] tend to have between two to three-and-a-half blank sides — sides that are either just blank walls or service bays, or, more likely, service bays located behind blank walls. So the way that a convention center integrates with the surrounding community, how it gives pedestrians access to the street in the right locations, is make or break in terms of whether it is going to generate pedestrians or both fail to energize the city and fail to entertain the conventioneers.
Is there a change in the willingness of city governments to look at walkability as something that is an economic- development tool? Absolutely. It’s not that they were ever against it; it’s just that it didn’t really come up. It used to be that the city’s planning director might have been arguing for walkability, but, typi- cally, the planning director would answer to or be considered less important than the economic-development director, who would generally just grab whatever big boxes he could to get tax revenue. What has changed is not what the planners are saying — it’s what the economic-development people are saying. Economic-development people are now understand- ing that the best thing a city can do to develop is to become a place where people want to be. Nowadays, people can locate anywhere. People can work from anywhere. And lifestyle is now considered a much more important factor in the deci- sions that people make. Furthermore, the up-and-coming generation of the Millennials is an extremely pro-urban generation. I quote [Brookings Institution Fellow Chris Leinberger], who talks about how, “You know, well, my generation was raised on ‘The Partridge Family’ and ‘The Brady Bunch.’ Theirs was raised on ‘Seinfeld’ and ‘Friends.’”
PCMA.ORG AUGUST 2013 PCMA CONVENE 93
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