BOOK EXCERPT

FromWalkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Walking is a simple and useful thing, and such a pleasure, too. It is what brings planeloads of Americans to Europe on holiday, including even some of the trafic engineers who make our own cities so inhospitable. Somewhere, deep in their caveman trafic engineer brains, even they must understand the value of moving under one’s own power at a relaxed pace through a public sphere that continuously rewards the senses.

This same tourist experience is commonplace in Washington, Charleston, New Orleans, Santa Fe, Santa Barbara — and a few other places in America that have elevated walking to an art form. They are the cities that enjoy a higher standard of living because they provide a better quality of life. Unfortunately, they remain the exceptions when they should just be normal.

This situation need not continue indefinitely — indeed, we can’t afford for it to. We need a new normal in America, one that welcomes walking.

unless you make sure that the design of the streets between them has retail fronting the sidewalks. I mean, nothing truly is as interesting to visitors as retail.

Suppose a city does have a big-box convention center. Are there some relatively easy things you can do to improve its integration with the surrounding community? A lot of convention centers and other larger box buildings perform the double sin of pulling back from the sidewalk and having a blank wall. And the nice thing, of course, is when you have a blank wall that is, say, 20 to 30 feet from the sidewalk. You could actually build stores in there. And conventioneers, of course, one of their responsibilities

is, certainly if they’ve been partying for three days away from home, they need to bring a gift home. Conventioneers are look- ing for entertainment, but they’re also looking for shopping.

Do you think it’s a good strategy for convention centers to include restaurants and retail that are open to the public as a way of energizing the surrounding area? Yes, as long the convention center’s mixed-use pieces have doors in and out. Obviously, they need to be accessed from the convention center, if the convention center [users] are going to like it. But it also needs to have doors and windows

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towards the street. And that is also a technique that super- markets are now doing. They take some of the sub-businesses within the supermarket, like a pharmacy or a photo shop, and give them their own street front, so you can access them both from the street and from the larger facility. The same thing is the best way to do it within convention centers. But the goal is to get as many people on the sidewalk as possible, in the same way that shopping malls are now not cool. The more that you can give the conventioneer an expe- rience of being out on the street in a walkable urban environ- ment, it’s going to be a preferred experience.

. Barbara Palmer is senior editor of Convene. ON THE WEB

Learn more about Jeff Speck andWalkable City — including Speck’s analyses of numerous downtowns — at jeffspeck.com.

AUGUST 2013 PCMA CONVENE

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