Walkable Cities

Revitalization, Vibrancy, and Sustainable Consumption

Carlos J. L. Balsas

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438476292
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Planificación de ciudades y desarrollo urbano

Gold Medalist, 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards in the Transportation (Auto/Aviation/Railroad) Category Co-Winner of the 2020 Global Division Outstanding Book Award presented by the Global Division of the Society for the Study of Social Problems Walkable precincts have become an important component of urban revitalization on both sides of the Atlantic. In Walkable Cities, Carlos J. L. Balsas examines a range of city scales and geographic settings on three continents, focusing on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), Latin America (Brazil and Mexico), and the United States (Phoenix and New York City). He explains how this "pedestrianization of Main Street" approach to central locations (downtowns and midtowns) has contributed to strengthening various urban functions, such as urban vitality, pedestrian and bicyclist safety, tourism, and more. However, it has also put pressure on less affluent, peripheral, and fragile areas due to higher levels of consumption and waste generation. Balsas calls attention to the need to base urban revitalization interventions on more spatially and socially just interventions coupled with sustainable consumption practices that do not necessarily entail high growth levels, but instead aim to improve the quality of city life.

1

Commercial Urbanism

Introduction

Retailing is one of the most dynamic economic sectors in cities with major impacts on the habitability of urban areas. New commercial formats and transactions have evolved over time and are in constant development. Examples range from shopping centers, franchise stores, retail parks, factory outlets, and leisure complexes to catalog sales, television, and the internet. For example, in many cities in the United States of America, many shops in the city center were forced to close not only due to the opening of shopping centers in more peripheral locations with more convenient vehicular accessibility and ample parking options, but also due to a lack of entrepreneurship of the economic actors located in central areas. At the present moment, the closure of stores in many first- and second-generation shopping centers is easily observed due to an increasing saturation of the marketplace.

Although the effects of these transformations have been known in the US for quite some time,1 in Europe and in some Latin American countries it is only recently that city and state administrations have become aware of the profound impacts associated with these changes.2 However, it is often found that local authorities are not technically prepared to manage these economic impacts sustainably. The objective of this chapter is to present a set of myths and principles of best practices on the revitalization of urban centers. These myths and best practices are structured in response to six main questions: What? Where? Who? Why? How? When? And they cover areas ranging from competitiveness, multifunctionality, urban actors, accessibility, public space improvements, urban management, and public-private partnerships.

The argument is that it is important not only to understand the myths that are used to justify certain revitalization options instead of others, but that it is also important to know best practices of urban revitalization in order to maintain and increase quality of life in cities. These myths and best practices are the result of research conducted over the last two decades, mostly in the United States, Southern Europe, Latin America, the Pearl River Delta, and Japan, which comprised many interviews with city planners, architects, place managers, retailers, business owners, politicians, and shoppers; extensive bibliographical reviews; and intense debates at many conferences and congresses.

This chapter is structured in five sections. The first section analyzes the city-commerce relationship and how profound changes in this sector have contributed to the decline of the city centers in the US. The second section presents several strategies used in the revitalization of urban centers, namely, the Main Street program and business improvement districts (BID) in the US, city center management schemes (also known as town center management schemes or TCM) in the United Kingdom, and commercial urbanism (CU) projects in Portugal. The third and fourth sections present a set of myths and best practices used in the commercial revitalization of urban centers, respectively. The last section offers some concluding remarks.

Urban Centers and Commerce

Urban centers are privileged places for commercial activity. Their organic mix of functions and uses means that many people travel daily to urban areas in order to carry out a great diversity of activities. It is well known that city centers are fragile and constantly changing places, mainly due to alterations in their economic and commercial structure. Commercial activity in Western cities has undergone tremendous changes in recent decades. The appearance of new commercial formats on the periphery of cities and the lack of entrepreneurship of traditional retailers has partly influenced the decline of urban centers. There is perhaps no country more suited to illustrate these changes than the United States of America.3 Before World War II, the centers of many North American cities were the privileged place of their respective communities. The city center was not only the economic and business center, but it was also an important part of social dynamics; people strolled the streets on the weekend to meet friends, window shop, or to watch some cultural performance.4

In the post–World War II period, the construction of the highway system, subsidized housing loans, and the extraordinary growth in vehicle fleets led to unidirectional developments toward the suburbs. This large and multifaceted suburbanization process, which practically involved all sectors ranging from housing, commerce, industry, services, and leisure, contributed greatly to the hollowing out of urban centers. Commercial developments in peripheral locations and in close connection with the abandonment of traditional buildings and establishments in city centers have led to serious economic and social problems and to the degradation of the urban environment in central areas. Declining sales in city centers has caused shops to close their doors and to relocate, often to new shopping centers in newly constructed suburbs.5

This resulted in a reduction of economic activity and less appealing urban centers, with mostly underutilized infrastructure. The fact that many of the buildings were abandoned, their windows and doors boarded up, and garbage accumulated on the streets gradually reinforced the public perception that these areas were in decline and not worth caring about. This whole situation results in what has been dubbed a “spiral of decline,” with buildings slowly deteriorating due to a lack of rehabilitation, which had tremendous negative consequences for urban livability, resulting in problems of vitality and viability of the affected areas.6 This situation repeated itself in city after city throughout the country.

If in the 1960s the prevailing attitude toward this exodus was to deny that the suburbs would occupy a prominent place in urban development, in the 1970s the attitude changed to a growing concern about the negative impact of this spatial imbalance. Thus, rather than revitalizing city centers, retailers and those responsible for downtown areas began to imitate the suburbs and to replicate many of their characteristics in the central areas of cities. National urban renewal policies contributed greatly to the demolition of large urban areas and the irreparable loss of many historic buildings in urban centers. Cleared urban blocks left vacant became surface parking lots. Traditional retail establishments have tried to imitate their new counterparts in the suburbs by closing entire streets to traffic and creating pedestrian areas, modernizing the facades of historic buildings with inexpensive materials reminiscent of those used in shopping centers. In addition, stakeholders installed gigantic advertising signs, thinking the size of advertisements was proportional to their power to attract consumers. Soon it was discovered that these ineffective methods did not change the declining situation because they did not correctly identify the main problem, which was not only the decrease in attractiveness but also the loss of economic competitiveness of the center to the suburbs.7

Thus, neither the denial of the problem, nor the imitation of the suburbs, nor the existence of large public investments served to alter substantially this course of events. In the late 1970s, there was a need to find innovative solutions to problems that had already existed for several decades. These solutions were radically different from those tested in the past and had three main characteristics: they were local, small scale, and were shared by public and private entities.8 During the 1980s, the first urban revitalization programs delivered some initial successes. These solutions were not based on large projects; instead, they were centered on various partnerships and small revitalization operations, such as the modernization of establishments with substantial historical and architectural value, the rehabilitation of the original facades, various promotional campaigns and street fairs, festivals and other popular events, and the centralized, commercial management of downtown retail. The victories of a few bold leaders rapidly gave visible results, which in turn led others to join subsequent revitalization initiatives.9

The suburbanization phenomenon and the visibly felt decline of city centers reached European cities after the reconstruction operations of World War II.10 Large European shopping centers and hypermarkets were built mainly in the 1980s and early 1990s. This shopping revolution only reached Southern European countries, and Portugal in particular, during the 1990s. But its consequences have been seriously felt by the older retail establishments in downtown areas. Also, in Latin America, these suburbanization trends have been observed over the past three decades. However, the impact of retail activities in the urban environment of São Paulo was a relatively recent phenomenon too.11 These trends demonstrate well the universality of peripheral commercial developments and the need to find timely responses to minimize their impacts in the decline of urban centers.

Return to the Center and Urban Revitalization

In the cities of Western Europe and North America, the decades of the 1990s and the 2000s were visibly impacted by city center revitalization interventions.12 After earlier decades being mostly characterized by the growth of suburban peripheries and centrifugal movements to the cities’ edges, the last 10 to 15 years were impacted by a general interest of the population, economic agents, and public authorities in reactivating city centers as places to live, work, shop, and recreate.13 This growing interest in the city center has resulted from a growing awareness of the crucial role that centers hold as privileged places in the economic, social, cultural, historical, political, and territorial organization of urban areas. In this sense, urban revitalization comprises the improvement of the physical, socioeconomic, cultural, historical, and political dimensions of cities. Often the main objective of urban revitalization operations has been to increase or improve the livability and sustainability of the local community by attracting and increasing employment, residential, recreation, and leisure opportunities and by ensuring more and better support services for the various socioeconomic groups.

In the United States and Canada, after several decades of suburbanization, more attention has been paid to the investment of funds and other resources in an attempt to make the future of these areas more viable in the long term.14 Key intervention strategies have included the creation of BIDs and the implementation of the Main Street program.15 While BIDs aim to provide a mechanism through which property owners can contribute financially to the provision of additional services in the public spaces surrounding their buildings,16 the Main Street program aims to help local communities develop a strategy of integrated commercial revitalization that stimulates economic development in a context of historical preservation. This program adapts to the needs and opportunities of local communities in four important areas:...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Commercial Urbanism
• Part I. Ibero-America
• Part II. United States
• Part III. Portugal
• Conclusion
• References
• Index
• Back Cover