Thursday 19 February 2009

A failed "main street" development

We have recently moved to a new suburb, where the closest shopping area is the Dog Swamp Shopping Centre. Despite its appealing name, the Shopping Centre features an unusual configuration of not one but two boxes, staring at each other across a carpark. The configuration does not do the shopping centre any favours, as each box is locked in competition with the other to attract customers.
Luckily, we are not far from the traditional shopping street of Mount Hawthorn. Excitedly, my girlfriend and i arrived to explore the main street - only to find that it was eerily quiet, like a sleepy country town. Despite being of a decent size, there was nowhere near the same number of people on the street in comparison to similar-sized main streets elsewhere. The main street itself couldn't be faulted, as it had all the usual suspects like cafés, a grocer, fashion retailers, a pub and bottle shop, post office and numerous salons all built up to the main street in a traditional manner.

It took me a week to discover The Mezz - a recently refurbished shopping centre right in the middle of the main street. Its refurbishment ticks all of the urban designer's boxes. It is built up to the main street, with shop frontage, generous pedestrian shelter, two-storey built form with articulation of the façade, and carparking hidden at the rear. It also features a new "main street" at the rear with more shop fronts on both sides, with gaps between the shops offering only fleeting glimpses of the carparking area. The reason it took me so long to find is this:

This picture shows the only entrance to the shopping centre from the main street. Can't find it? Hint: It's just to the right of the Dôme café. Inside, the entrance looks like this:

Pretty underwhelming; it looks like this street entrance has been put in as an afterthought, and probably to the detriment of the café.
Why does this shopping centre fail? Quite simply, it subtracts from the main street. By providing such a poor link between the shopping centre and the main street, it does not invite people to move between the two, but instead discourages it. Shopping centre users have no reason to go to the main street or vice versa. In essence, it has destroyed the symbiotic relationship that all shops in a shopping centre depend on, that shoppers will pass their shops and buy on impulse.
Neither is the new main street successful - it has no relationship to the real main street or even the side streets that it connects to. The design in inward looking and offers nothing to its surrounding environment. This is a view of the new "main street" from the side street:

No wonder we found the Mount Hawthorn main street unusually quiet - The Mezz is designed to operate in almost complete isolation to the main street it is attached to, much like the two halves of the Dog Swamp Shopping Centre. With this shopping centre versus main street dichotomy, both are likely to struggle to survive, given the lack of a relationship between the two parts. Town planners and urban designers when considering any development proposal should always ensure that the development adds to, and does not subtract from, its environment.

Thursday 12 February 2009

Places people would want to get married in

Kate (Tina Fey) being rewarded with five minutes of uninterrupted eye contact with her boss Barry (Steve Martin) in Baby Mama

Recently my girlfriend and i were watching Baby Mama, starring Tina Fey. In the film her new-age boss, played by Steve Martin, has asked her to be in charge of designing the organic food store's new flagship store. Amongst other things such as public involvement at the earliest possible stage, one of the criterion given to her is to design a store that people will want to get married in.

Many local governments will often provide extensive design criteria covering aspects such as roof pitches, window sizes, colour palettes, setbacks, building height - the list can be extensive. However, often the outcome is the creation of buildings that are deemed to comply, the bare minimum to achieve the specific criteria, neighbourhoods lacking in innovative, interesting places.

What if we get rid of all of these prescriptive standards, and instead introduce a single proscriptive standard - "Will people want to to get married in it?" If yes, approve. If not, send it back and try again.

It can be applied to anything - think of your local neighbourhood.

- King Street in Perth's west end? Tick.
- The Rocks in Sydney? Tick.
- London, Paris, Rome, or any one of the towns and villages lining the Mediterranean? Tick.
- Most suburban shopping centres? Cross
- Service commercial strips? Cross.

This also has the advantage of being a lot easier to interpret that the standard planner-speak terms like "amenity" and "does not detract from the streetscape," to which to the average person may not have the same level of understanding.
The adoption of this standard would encourages architects and designers to design buildings of beauty, rather than buildings that comply with a certain set of rules, and no doubt communities will be able to provide valuable input on the developments happening in their neighbourhoods. And any thing that leads to the creation of beautiful places must be a good thing.

Sunday 8 February 2009

Taking the cars off the road

Frematle's endangered High Street mall, photo courtesy of http://john.curtin.edu.au/fremantle/lawrence.html#six

Across Australia, business owners have been calling for pedestrian malls to be reopened to traffic - a slap across the faces of the planners who fought for the creation of these malls in the 1970s. After all, don't malls create a safe environment for shoppers to stroll at will, without the hassle of noisy and smoky cars, obstacles and greatly-reduced pavement widths?

Towns in question include Townsnville, Fremantle, Wooloongong, Darwin, and many others. At least six have already been reopened to traffic in Sydney. Opening malls to traffic has generally led to a reduction in crime and anti-social behaviour, and a decrease in the number of vacant shops. Of course, the lack of diversity of land uses in these mainly-retail malls contributed to a decrease in activity after hours, as well as the opening of suburban shopping centres as a major competition for these malls.

An interesting parallel is the market failure of San Diego's Uptown development, a new urbanist neighbourhood with pedestrian-friendly streets and carparking located out of sight at the rear of buildings, and mostly underground. Touted as a leading example of new urbanist design, the neighbourhood has seen a lot of businesses fail on its main street, including a yogurt shop, women's clothing store, coffeehouse, Italian restaurant, chicken rotisserie restaurant, local clothing designers' store, evening gown rental shop, and travel agency, all of which have gone out of business since the district opened.

The failure could be attributed by the district's willingness to cater for the car, by providing its ample parking underground, conveniently linked to the shops on the main street, but separated from the pedestrian environment.

All of this seems too familiar - where else have we witnessed attempts to separate car and pedestrian movements? This was one of the critical design elements of the Radburn new town, which influenced the design of many Australian suburbs in the 1960s. The practice of pedestrian open space links entirely separated from the road network was intended to provide safety - ironically it had the complete opposite effect. It didn't help that many Australian versions turned their backs to the open space, creating spaces almost entirely unsurveilled.

Only in areas where there is a high density and a diverse mix of uses can pedestrian-only environments flourish - even then cars and delivery vehicles should be incorporated - otherwise there will again be the risk of creating vehicle spaces that are unsafe, for all the same reasons.

Welcome to Borrowed Places

Having grown frustrated at the lack of good Australia urban design blogs, i have created Borrowed Places to examine good and bad examples of planning in Australia and elsewhere, but particularly my home town of Perth.

The emphasis is the theory and practice behind good places, and how to successfully create them.